IDC: Public cloud infrastructure spending boom will continue

IDC has revealed public cloud infrastructure spending will grow almost 14% year-on-year in 2017, the biggest increase out of all cloud-based infrastructure.

In total, cloud spending - covering server, enterprise storage and ethernet switches - will grow 12.4% over 2017, growing to a worth of $40.1 billion (£31 billion) over 12 months. Off-premise private clouds will grow 11.9% year-on-year, while on-premise clouds will grow the least out of all infrastructure spending, at 9.6% in 2017.

"The overall profile of spending on IT infrastructure in various deployment/location scenarios seen in 2016 will continue in 2017 with some differences in specific technology segments," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director of Enterprise Storage at IDC.

For example, ethernet switches will experience the highest level of growth at 25.7%, while enterprise storage will account for 12% of growth and servers 9.1%

"Enterprise adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud IT strategies and the proliferation of cloud-native applications and areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT), which embrace a cloud-first approach to supporting IT resources, will fuel further increases in end-user spending on services-based IT.

"In turn, this move will be reflected in a shift of the overall spending on IT infrastructure from on-premises to off-premises deployments and from traditional IT to cloud IT."

Over the next five years, IDC thinks public cloud infrastructure spending will remain the fastest growing technology, accounting for almost 80% of total cloud infrastructure spending. By 2020, the research firm thinks cloud infrastructure spending will surpass non-cloud infrastructure, which will decline at a rate of 3.1% over the next three years.