Led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the market will grow 29% per year until 2019
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing is a fast growing market, leaping up 33% in 2015 to become an estimated $16.5 billion market, according to research firm Gartner.
The market shows no signs of slowing down, with a compound annual growth rate of 29.1% predicted for the next four years until 2019.
Although fast-growing, the cloud market is still dwarfed by the overall worldwide IT spend, which Gartner estimates is more than $3.5 trillion worldwide.
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Cloud is growing fast though. For the first time this year growth of public cloud IaaS workloads outpaced that of on-premises workloads. One in 10 CIOs surveyed by Gartner say they have adopted a cloud-first strategy, while 83% consider IaaS a viable option to use.
The breadth of services offered by vendors – led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine – mean that the cloud is ready for prime-time. Any workload that can be hosted on an x86 server is reasonably suited to fit somewhere in the cloud. “Cloud IaaS can now be used to run most workloads, although not every provider can run every type of workload well,” said Lydia Leong, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst.
Gartner says the most common use cases for IaaS cloud include:
- Development and testing environments
- High performance computing and batch processing
- Internet-facing websites and web-based applications
- Non-mission critical internal business applications
