Aus public cloud services market to grow to $10.6bn in 2021

Gartner forecasts that Australian organisations will spend A$10.6 billion on public cloud services this year, an increase of 18.4% from 2020.

In addition, the analysts find that spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total US$332.3 billion, up from US$270 billion in 2020.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to reach A$5.7 billion in Australia in 2021 as the demand for composable applications requires a different type of SaaS experience.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will see the highest growth in 2021, 30.2% and 57.7% respectively, as CIOs face continued pressures to scale infrastructure that supports moving complex workloads to the cloud and the demands of a hybrid workforce.

On a global basis, despite macroeconomic headwinds, offerings that support or deliver public cloud services are experiencing tremendous growth.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment globally and is forecast to reach $122.6 billion in 2021.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will see the highest growth in 2021, 38.5% and 67.7% respectively.

Gartner research vice president Michael Warrilow says, "Organisations in Australia and New Zealand 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.

Warrilow says, "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.

Warrilow continues, "It's important to note that the usage and adoption of cloud that served enterprises well during the ongoing crisis will not look the same in the coming years.

"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.

"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.

Gartner's Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 1Q21 Update, is available now.