Global public cloud spending to reach $332.3 billion in 2021

Spending on global public cloud services is projected to reach $332.3 billion in 2021, increasing by 23.1% from $270 billion in 2020. According to Gartner, growth in cloud spending can be attributed to increased adoption in technologies such as virtualization, edge computing and containerization.

Driven by demand for composable applications, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will account for the largest market segment to reach $122.6 billion in 2021. Gartner cited that SaaS-based applications will be instrumental in countries’ efforts to produce and distribute COVID-19 vaccinations, in areas such as automation and supply chain. These applications will help CIOs validate the shift to cloud.

Desktop-as-a-service will experience the highest growth at 67.7% to reach $2 billion, while infrastructure-as-a-service will grow by 38.5% this year to reach $82 billion. In 2022, growth in these areas is expected to slow down.

While cloud services boomed in the past year, Gartner predicts that spending on cloud might take a different note in 2021 and 2022 as enterprises shift away from infrastructure and application migration towards advanced applications integrating AI and IoT and 5G.

In the first quarter of 2021, research and analytics firm Canalys reported that global cloud services infrastructure spending grew to $41.8 billion to represent a 35% year-on-year increment and 5% quarter-on-quarter growth.