Public cloud services market saw huge growth in 2020 — IDC

IDC has revealed its latest research on the global public cloud services market, showing it had grown 24.1% year-over-year in 2020 with revenues totalling $312 billion.

This includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), system infrastructure software as a service (SISaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

It was heavily influenced by a consolidation of spending last year — the top five public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) inflated their spending by 32%, and combined captured 38% of the worldwide total.

Microsoft has clinched the top spot tied with AWS, with both companies totalling a 12.8% revenue share for 2020 in the public cloud services market.

"Access to shared infrastructure, data, and application resources in public clouds played a critical role in helping organisations and individuals navigate the disruptions of the past year," says IDC group vice president of worldwide research Rick Villars.

"In the coming years, enterprises' ability to govern a growing portfolio of cloud services will be the foundation for introducing greater automation into business and IT processes while also becoming more digitally resilient.

Despite the overall growth in the public cloud managed services market, not all managed services grew as much as others — IDC says the IaaS and PaaS services, in particular, grew much faster.

The analyst firm highlighted the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure to build cloud foundations as a reason for this high growth. Spending on IaaS and PaaS is also expected to grow at a higher rate than the entire cloud market, IDC predicts, as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.

"Cloud service providers are rapidly expanding their portfolio of infrastructure and platform services to address confidential computing, performance intensive computing, and hybrid deployment scenarios," says IDC vice president for cloud and edge infrastructure services Dave McCarthy.

"Extending these foundational cloud services to customer premises and communications networks enables a broader set of use cases than previously possible.

IDC research director for platform-as-a-service Lara Greden says the heightened growth of PaaS, IaaS and SISaaS reflects the demand for solutions that accelerate and automate the development and delivery of modern applications.

"As organisations adopt DevOps approaches and align according to value streams, we are seeing PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS solutions become increasingly adopted and, at the same time, grow in the range of services and thus value they provide," says Greden.

"Innovations in edge and IoT use cases are also contributing to the faster rates of growth in these markets.