IT infrastructure spend is heading to the cloud

Spending on IT infrastructure for the cloud is climbing and may overtake traditional deployments by 2020, according to IDC.

Public cloud services slice of infrastructure spend is set to be the fastest-growing segment in 2017, the analyst firm said, topping the growth in investment on kit for private cloud as well as non-cloud, traditional set-ups.

Total spending on IT infrastructure products — which includes server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches — for deployment in cloud environments will rise 12.4% year over year in 2017 to $40.1 billion. Public cloud will eat up 61% of that spending, growing at an even faster clip of 13.8%.

Private cloud spending on infrastructure is also on the rise. Off-premise infrastructure spending will climb at 11.9% year on year, while on-premises private cloud spending will grow at 9.6% in 2017.

The figures suggest more infrastructure spend will head to the cloud than traditional deployments by 2020.

Though non-cloud deployments still eat up 58.7% of the overall end-user spending on such IT infrastructure products, that's falling by 4.6% this year, and down from 62.6% in 2016. By 2020, non-cloud IT infrastructure spend will fall to 48.6%.

"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," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director of Enterprise Storage at IDC. "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."