The market researchers at IDC are predicting that the hosted private cloud (HPC) services industry will be worth more than $24 billion by 2016 — a compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent. The firm believes the virtual private cloud market is poised to take off as enterprises seek to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing but avoid the security and compliance headaches associated with public clouds. And they say many enterprises will likely seek hosting providers who can handle some of the management burden of the cloud environment.
IDC advised technology vendors to go after cloud computing business. “Not even the largest technology incumbents can sustain IT market leadership without achieving leadership in cloud services,” IDC’s Robert Mahowald warned. “Quite simply, vendor failure in cloud services will mean stagnation.”