End-user public cloud spending worldwide to reach $500 bn in 2022: Gartner

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% in 2022 to total $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021, stated a report by Gartner. In 2023, end-user spending is expected to reach nearly $600 billion.

The report further stated that in India, end-user spending on the public cloud will total $7.5 billion in 2022, growing 29.3% from 2021. Cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) is forecast to record the highest growth in 2022 (39.4%), followed by cloud application infrastructure services. IaaS will also be the highest spending vertical for end-users in India in 2022. 

“Cloud is the powerhouse that drives today’s digital organisations,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “CIOs are beyond the era of the irrational exuberance of procuring cloud services and are being thoughtful in their choice of public cloud providers to drive specific, desired business and technology outcomes in their digital transformation journey.”

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2022 at 30.6%, followed by desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) at 26.6% and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 26.1%. The new reality of hybrid work is prompting organisations to move away from powering their workforce with traditional client computing solutions, such as desktops and other physical in-office tools, and toward DaaS, which is driving spending to reach $2.6 billion in 2022. Demand for cloud-native capabilities by end-users accounts for PaaS growing to $109.6 billion in spending, the report stated.

“Cloud-native capabilities such as containerisation, database platform-as-a-service (dbPaaS) and artificial intelligence/machine learning contain richer features than commoditised compute such as IaaS or network-as-a-service,” said Nag. “As a result, they are generally more expensive which is fueling spending growth.” 

According to the report, SaaS remains the largest public cloud services market segment, forecasted to reach $176.6 billion in end-user spending in 2022. Gartner expects steady velocity within this segment as enterprises take multiple routes to market with SaaS, for example via cloud marketplaces, and continue to break up larger, monolithic applications into composable parts for more efficient DevOps processes.