According to a new analysis by Gartner, public cloud services market is projected to grow from $153.5 billion in 2017 to $186.4 billion in 2018, which is a rise of 21.4 percent.
Amongst the cloud segments, IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) was identified as the fastest growing segment, predicted to grow 35.9 percent in 2018, reaching $40.8 billion, led by leading IaaS providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Source: Gartner
SaaS (Software-as-a-service) was again identified as one of the largest segments of the cloud market with a revenue growth expected of 22.2 percent, to hit $73.6 billion in 2018. Gartner also predicted that by 2021, SaaS will reach 45 percent of the total application software spending.
SaaS based application models are becoming a preferred choice for most of the enterprises. Sid Nag, who is a research director at Gartner, thinks that the SaaS demands are changing with users seeking more purpose-built solutions that can meet their specific business outcomes.
Under PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) segment, dbPaaS (database platform as a service) is seeing the highest demand, expected to hit $10 billion by the year 2021. As a result, the hyperscale cloud providers are expanding their range of services to include dbPaaS.
Talking about the high demand of dbPaaS, Mr. Nag said that the customers should explore other dbPaaS service offers apart from the one offered by the large service providers, to avoid any lock-in.
Despite the high forecast rates, Gartner expects the growth rate to stabilize from 2018 onwards, due to the maturity that cloud services might gain within the IT segment.
One of the primary challenges here is to avoid vendor lock-in. With most of the big cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft etc. offering major cloud services, companies that once use any vendor’s cloud platform can find it very expensive and complicated to move away again.
Gartner said that this scenario might give rise to new demands by customers who want easy migration of their apps and data, without any penalties.
