Public and private cloud now account for a quarter of infrastructure spending
Spending on cloud infrastructure in Europe is on the up.
A quarter of IT infrastructure spending in Europe is now going to building public and private cloud systems.
According to IDC, infrastructure spending -- which it defines as servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switch -- for public and private cloud in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew by 17.6 percent year-on-year to $1.3bn in the first quarter of this year.
The analysts said that cloud-related infrastructure spending is likely to reach $10.7bn by 2020 -- nearly half of the total market.
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In contrast, spending on traditional infrastructure will be stagnant "if not declining", said Kamil Gregor, research analyst in IDCs European Infrastructure Group. However, despite the cloud hype, three-quarters of spending on infrastructure still goes to internal projects.
IDC noted its forecast for the UK may be adjusted downward in the following quarter, as it expects a "challenging transition" if the UK activates the process of EU withdrawal, although other European markets are expected to remain largely unaffected.
In Western Europe, the growth in cloud infrastructure spending has been distributed nearly equally between enterprise storage and servers, with year-on-year growth of 12 percent and 16.6 percent, respectively (the two types of technology currently account for about 42 percent and 45 percent of the total market).
The cloud-related share of total EMEA infrastructure expenditure on server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch grew by 4 percent compared with last year to more than 25.1 percent in 1Q16. In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented around 29.9 percent of total EMEA capacity in 1Q16, with a 6.1-percent decline over the same period a year before.