The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4% in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).
The fastest-growing segment of the market is cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service or IaaS), which is forecast to grow 35.9% in 2018 to reach $40.8 billion, adds the research group. Gartner expects the top 10 providers to account for nearly 70% of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50%t in 2016.
“The increasing dominance of the hyperscale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end users and other market participants,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organizations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market. In response to multicloud adoption trends, organizations will increasingly demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offerings without penalties.”
