News

Cloud Now Makes Up a Third of All IT Infrastructure Spending

• By Keith Ward
• January 09, 2015

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly entrenched in datacenters, judging from recent figures from analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

For the third quarter of 2014, nearly a third of combined IT infrastructure spending -- including hardware switches, storage and servers -- came from cloud deployments, IDC reported last month.

Cloud spending totaled $6.5 billion for the period, a 16 percent year-over-year increase. According to IDC, public cloud infrastructure comprised about half of that total.

In fact, spending on the public cloud is growing slightly faster -- 18 percent year over year -- than private cloud spending.

"Public and private clouds represent the 'compute factories' and 'digital content depots' of the 3rd Platform era," said IDC's Richard Villars said in the press release. "Whether internally owned or 'rented' from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organizations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first-mover advantage to any organization in a hyper-competitive market."

The IDC report was the first of its new Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, which follows IT spending specifically for the cloud market. It further breaks down the spending into public and private cloud sectors. The revenue is based on sales of three market segments: server, disk and networking technologies.