Impressive growth in the global cloud computing market is expected to continue across 2024 and beyond, analysts have told ITPro.
As generative AI continues to be a focus for enterprises, along with other burgeoning trends in the cloud market such as sustainability, the overall cloud economy will continue to benefit, according to Gartner analyst Hardeep Singh.
“Already we’ve seen growth accelerating in 2024, and we’re projected this to continue through 2025 as enterprises integrate generative AI into their technology portfolio,” Singh told ITPro.
“New markets and opportunities continue to develop around sovereignty, ethics, privacy and sustainability,” he added.
The cloud market grew significantly over the last year with enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reaching over $76 billion globally for Q1 2024, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
This represents an increase of $13.5 billion from Q1 2023, marking 21% growth and making it the second consecutive quarter in which year-on-year growth has improved.
Synergy estimated that quarterly cloud service revenues from IaaS, PaaS, and private cloud solutions were $76.5 billion, with public IaaS and PaaS accounting for a 23% bulk of the market. The overall cloud services market also had trailing twelve month revenues reaching $283 billion.
Hyperscalers continue to dominate the sector, with AWS maintaining a strong lead at 31% market share and Microsoft and Google Cloud following at 25% and 11% respectively.
The big three account for 72% of the global public cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. However, other companies with smaller percentages of the market such as Huawei, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Oracle, are making headway off the back of enterprise AI interest.
“Through 2023, all of the hyperscalers made significant investments in AI-powered enhancements to their existing platforms and developer-focused offerings,” Singh said.
“This is expected to continue through the next several years as the market matures, alongside rising AI/ML workloads from organizations moving pilot projects into production,” he added.
Though the market is now too large to return to pre-2022 growth rates, chief Synergy analyst John Dinsdale said, the market is continuing to expand substantially, contrary to fears last year that the cloud sector was approaching a global slowdown.
“We are forecasting that it will double in size over the next four years,” Dinsdale said.
Claims of a slowdown at the beginning of 2023 were based on a study from the Uptime Institute, which showed that AWS and Microsoft experienced slower growth toward the end of 2022.
This was attributed to economic uncertainty at the time, with rising costs and disruptions causing organizations to begin cutting back on spending and restricting budgets.
These fears were put to bed in late 2023, however, after a whirlwind year in which major hyperscalers performed well off the back of widespread enterprise interest in generative AI.
Earlier this year, research from Canalys predicted an increase of 20% in global cloud spending for 2024, estimating that key factors such as enterprise IT optimization would begin to drive growth.
