IDC: Cloud Now Accounts for 30 Percent of IT Spending

Cloud spending made up 30 percent of all IT infrastructure during the last quarter of 2014 according to IDC’s quarterly cloud computing tracker.

Cloud spending, which includes money splashed on servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switches, grew by 14.4 percent year-on-year to $8 billion, according to the report.

Acceleration

Richard Villars, a data centre and cloud research vice president at IDC, said the acceleration in spending is down to the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures in businesses.

“A key driver of this acceleration is organisations’ development and use of new Internet of Things services that require levels of agility and scale that only cloud solutions can deliver,” he explained.

For the full year cloud IT infrastructure spending totalled $26.4 billion, up 18.7 percent year on year from $22.3 billion; private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7 percent year over year, while public cloud spending was $16.5 billion, up 17.5 percent year over year.

Fail to show

But Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts, claims that the figures from IDC fail to show the fact that a large proportion of cloud users are paying for services that they will never fully utilise.

“According to some research of recent industry figures we conducted last year, companies were wasting around £1 billion a year on unused cloud capacity, and these recent figures from IDC show this level of wasted capacity is only increasing,” he argued.

Davies argues that the reason for this is that the current model of IaaS is based on the use of virtual machines, where computing power is paid for on a provision basis, but this is “at best 50 percent utilised” by typical workloads.

Take the TechWeekEurope biz mobility quiz here!