Cloud is now "the new normal" for enterprises, according to Synergy Research Group, which found that the cloud market had grown by 24% overall in 2017.
IaaS and PaaS services claimed the largest rates of growth at 47%, with enterprise SaaS following behind in second place with a rate of 31% and hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 30%. In total, revenues reached $180 billion (132.74 billion) last year. Meanwhile, cloud service markets grew more than three times faster than spend on the hardware and software used for cloud infrastructure.
"We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and 2016 as the year when cloud started to dominate many IT market segments. In 2017 cloud was the new normal," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.
The winners in the IaaS and PaaS sector were AWS and Microsoft, while Microsoft and Salesforce led enterprise SaaS and IBM and Rackspace performing best in the hosted private cloud sub-sector.
Public cloud continues to grow faster than private cloud, despite the amount of money spent on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure split pretty evenly between the two clouds variations.
Infrastructure investments by the major cloud providers enabled them to generate $100 billion (73.74 billion) in revenues from IaaS, PaaS and enterprise SaaS.
"Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths," Dinsdale added. "Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years."
