Private cloud spending is increasing year over year, new study finds

A new International Data Corporation (IDC) study has found that private cloud spending is increasing by 28% year over year. According to IDC, worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure amounted to almost half of overall IT infrastructure spending.

Vendor revenue from infrastructure products soars

According to the report, vendor revenue from infrastructure products for cloud IT rose 48.4% year over year in 2Q18. Revenue reached a massive $15.4 billion from products including public and private cloud.

The IDC also said it forecasts total spending on cloud IT infrastructure to reach $62.2 billion in 2018. This amounts to a year over year growth of 31.1%.

Quarterly spending on public cloud IT infrastructure was $10.9 billion in the second quarter of 2018, which is equivalent to 58.9% year over year growth. Private cloud spending benefitted from an increase of 28.2% year over year, and reached $4.6 billion.

Off-premises private cloud receives strong growth

Private off-cloud premises entails a business buying and owning the equipment, but hosting this equipment using a cloud provider. This enables companies to expand data centres without committing to the capital investment or operating a facility.

IDC forecasts that traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure for the year will only rise by 10.3%. By 2019, however, non-cloud IT spending could represent just 44% of the global IT infrastructure spending - a drop of 6.5% from 2018.

Natalya Yezhkova, research director for IT Infrastructure and Platforms at IDC, elaborated on the data in a statement. "As share of cloud environments in the overall spending on IT infrastructure continues to climb and approaches 50 percent, it is evident that cloud is now the norm," she said.

"One of the tasks for enterprises now is not only to decide on what cloud resources to use, but actually how to manage multiple cloud resources," Yezhkova added. "End users' ability to utilise multi-cloud resources is an important driver of further proliferation for both public and private cloud environments."