Market research firm Gartner is forecasting that the public cloud computing market will be worth $204 billion in 2016, a 16.5 percent increase over last year. That means cloud spending is growing much faster than IT budgets overall, which are increasing between 1 and 3 percent.
“The market for public cloud services is continuing to demonstrate high rates of growth across all markets and Gartner expects this to continue through 2017,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “This strong growth continues to reflect a shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, due to increased trend of organizations pursuing a digital business strategy.”
The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market is expected to be the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud, but software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will also see strong growth.
