According to a new report from Canalys, organizations worldwide spent a whopping $107bn on cloud computing infrastructure services last year.
It was reported that spending on cloud computing infrastructure services was up by 37 percent in comparison to the previous year. Canalys further reported that a third of the spending in 2019 went to Amazon’s cloud computing division, AWS.
Businesses have increased how much they spend on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as industries continue to digitize as well as their investments in storage, servers, compute, and other cloud-based services. It is believed that this upward trend in spending is likely to continue over the next five years. The report by Canalys further disclosed that the total spending on cloud infrastructure services will reach $284bn in 2024.
Alastair Edwards, the chief analyst at Canalys, said in a press release that this surge in cloud infrastructure spending is credited to the fact that many organizations that are outside of the technology domain are now transitioning to become technology providers. Edwards remarked that organizations across all industries, from financial services to healthcare, are transitioning to being technology providers. Many are using a combination of multi-clouds and hybrid IT models, recognizing the strengths of each cloud service provider and the different compute operating environments needed for specific types of workloads.
The role of channel partners was also highlighted by Edwards in the future of cloud computing. It was remarked by Edwards that the role of channel partners will become more important, as cloud use increases, in terms of defining application strategies, integration into business processes, optimizing user experiences, governance and compliance, as well as securing data and workloads.
The report by Canalys revealed that organizations spent $34.6bn on the cloud infrastructure of AWS that was up from $25.4bn the previous year. At the same time, the market share of Amazon increased slightly from 32.7 percent in 2018 to 34.6 percent last year with a 36 percent annual growth rate.
Microsoft Azure came in second with customers spending $18.1bn last year, up from $11bn the previous year. The market share of Azure also increased from 14.2 percent to 16.9 percent in 2019. The cloud computing division of Microsoft saw a 63.9 percent annual growth rate.
