Public Cloud Grew Faster Than Both Private And Hybrid Cloud In 2015

Total cloud revenues hit $110bn, growing 28 percent annually

As we settle in to 2016, new research from Synergy Research Group has claimed that 2015 was a year where the growth rate for public Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS/PaaS) services hit 51 percent, outgrowing the private and hybrid cloud segment.

The news puts cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure into a good stead for 2016, as customers are increasingly flocking to the services the aforementioned providers dish out.

Yet private and hybrid cloud providers, such as IBM, aren’t too far behind. Synergy said that the private and hybrid cloud market grew 45 percent in the four quarters up to September 2015.

Expansion

cloudIt’s just one week into the new year, and Amazon Web Services has announced the opening of a new cloud region in Korea, the fifth such region in Asia Pacific. The provider also revealed further price cuts to its EC2 service. The public cloud provider is the largest in the world, raking in revenues of more than $6 billion in 2015.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

But does mainstream cloud equate to public cloud? IDC last October predicted that spending on private cloud IT infrastructure grew 15.8 percent year over year, compared to the growth of public cloud IT infrastructure, which stood at 29.6 percent – a market worth $20.5 billion. Looking ahead to 2019, IDC expects service providers will spend $33.6 billion on IT infrastructure for delivering public cloud services, while spending on private cloud IT infrastructure will reach $19.4 billion.

“Numerous IDC surveys indicate growing interest among enterprise customers to cloud deployments across multiple IT domains,” said Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director at IDC.

“End users continue to evaluate various approaches to adopting cloud-based IT: some integrate public cloud service into their IT strategies, others choose to build their own private clouds or use third-party private cloud offerings, and some, seeing benefits in both, implement hybrid cloud strategies.”

Here’s how 2015 looked from Synergy’s perspective:

public cloud“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud,” said Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.

But across all of the predictions and past statistics, it’s clear public cloud is going to be a dominant force in the future cloud landscape. It’s time for the private cloud vendors to innovate, evaluate, and state their case for a private and hybrid future.

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