IaaS grows as cloud-native becomes primary architecture for modern workloads: Gartner

The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market worldwide grew 41.4% in 2021, to total $90.9 billion, up from $64.3 billion in 2020, according to Gartner. Amazon retained the top position in the IaaS market in 2021, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei, it said.

In 2021, the top five IaaS providers accounted for over 80% of the market, said Gartner adding that Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of $35.4 billion in 2021 and 38.9% market share.

“The IaaS market continues to grow unabated as cloud-native becomes the primary architecture for modern workloads,” said Sid Nag, VP Analyst at Gartner. “Cloud supports the scalability and composability that advanced technologies and applications require, while also enabling enterprises to address emerging needs such as sovereignty, data integration and enhanced customer experience.”

Microsoft followed in the second position with 21.1% share and above-market growth, reaching over $19 billion in IaaS revenue in 2021.

With several organisations already relying on Microsoft’s enterprise software and services, Azure has been positioned to capture opportunities across nearly every vertical market.

The report showed that Alibaba was again the third largest IaaS public cloud provider worldwide with 9.5% market share and revenue of $8.7 billion for 2021. While Alibaba continues to lead the Chinese cloud market, it is also poised to be the leading regional provider in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other emerging cloud markets, given its local market understanding and ability to serve as a bridge to digital commerce.

Google Cloud saw the highest growth rate of the top five IaaS vendors, growing 63.7% in 2021 to reach $6.4 billion in revenue. This growth was driven by steadily increased adoption for traditional enterprise workloads as well as Google’s innovation in more cutting-edge capabilities such as artificial intelligence and Kubernetes container technologies, supported by an expansion of their partner ecosystem to reach a wider customer base, the report said.

And May 24 report by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) showed similar trend. It said that India’s public cloud services market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), revenue totalled $4.6 billion for July-December 2021. The overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to reach $13.5 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 24% during 2021-26, it said. 

India continues to be among the fastest-growing markets for public cloud service providers due to the robust demand from large enterprises, digital natives, and from small and medium businesses in the country, said IDC adding that all of them are looking for innovations. It said that in 2021, enterprises continued to invest in public cloud to ensure business continuity, improve resilience and productivity, and drive digital innovation. 

Rishu Sharma, Associate Research Director, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence, IDC India said that with digital innovation shaping the top business objectives “for Indian organisations, cloud adoption is set to accelerate this year." 

SaaS continued to be the largest component of the overall public cloud services market, followed by IaaS and PaaS in 2021, said IDC. 

According to Gartner’s Nag, the next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital outcomes and the virtual-first world.

“Emerging technologies that can help businesses bring experiences closer to their customers, such as the metaverse, chatbots and digital twins, will require hyperscale infrastructure to meet growing demands for compute and storage power,” said Nag.