Credit: Billy Huynh on Unsplash
Spending on public cloud services in Australia is forecast to reach $10.6 billion by the end of 2021, an increase of 18.4 per cent from a year ago, following a push for the technology driven by the coronavirus pandemic.
This is according to analyst firm Gartner, with its research vice president Michael Warrilow claiming organisations in Australia responded to COVID-19 by accelerating their adoption of cloud.
“Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud. It allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud,” he said.
“Emerging technologies such as containerisation, desktop-as-a-service and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. And hyperscale public cloud services have proven their underlying scalability and elasticity.
“This has led to stronger forecasts for cloud adoption in coming years. We also expect to see hyperscale providers increase their presence in this region.”
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is expected to be the largest market segment within public cloud in 2021 at $5.7 billion — nearly half of the overall public cloud spend — representing a year-on-year increase of about 17 per cent.
Meanwhile, the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) segment is anticipated to see the highest level of spending growth, at 57.7 per cent year-on-year, to $68 million. Expected to come in second is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), with spending growth of 30.2 per cent year-on-year, to $1.6 billion.
These figures, however, are below the global average, with worldwide public cloud spending expected to grow by 23.1 per cent, year-on-year, to US$332.3 billion, and spending on software-as-a-service forecast to grow by 19.3 per cent, to US$112.6 billion, by the end of the year.
Warrilow also noted that the usage and adoption of cloud that occurred during the last 12 months is also expected to differ in the future.
“It will evolve from serving pedestrian use cases such as infrastructure and application migration, to those that combine cloud with technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 5G and more,” he said.
“In other words, cloud will serve as the glue between many other technologies that CIOs want to use more of, allowing them to address more complex and emerging use cases. It will be a disruptive market, to say the least.”
