Gartner forecasts public cloud computing to be a $300 billion business by 2021

Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, forecasts that the global public cloud services market will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years, as enterprises increasingly transition to the cloud to achieve their desired digital business outcomes. “Building, implementing and maturing cloud strategies will continue to be a top priority for years to come,” says Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. This is no wonder at all - cloud services are capable of providing the speed and agility required for modern digital business processes. Moreover, moving a business to the cloud can lead to cost savings and even generate new sources of revenue.

According to Gartner, the global cloud services market is forecast to grow 17.5% this year to total $214.3 billion, up from $182.4 billion in 2018.

Breaking down the total market into segments, it’s easy to see that software as a service (SaaS) takes up a little less than half of the total revenue - $99.5 billion. Next year, it is also expected to remain the largest market segment due to the scalability of subscription-based software. The second-largest segment in 2019, business processes as a service (BPaaS), will give way to cloud system infrastructure services or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in 2020. Among all market segments, IaaS is projected the highest growth rate in the coming years due to the specific infrastructure requirements of modern applications and workloads.

According to Gartner’s forecasts, the global public cloud services market is expected to total $266.4 billion in 2020, growing from $227.8 billion in 2019.

In 2021, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to hit the threshold of $300 billion, achieving $308.5 billion in total. Finally, in 2022, the market will supposedly total $354.6 billion.