Cloud takes up 10pc of external IT spend, says Gartner

Over a tenth of IT spending on outsourcing during 2010 will have been on external cloud services, according to analyst firm Gartner.

IT managers and budget decision-makers who took part in a survey said that, on average, 10.2 percent of spending on external IT services in 2010 will have gone to external cloud service providers, said Gartner in a statement on Wednesday. More than 1,500 people were interviewed for the survey.

"The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39 percent of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organisation," said Bob Igou, a research director at Gartner, in the statement. "This is yet another trend that indicates a shift in spending from traditional IT assets such as the datacentre assets and a move towards assets that are accessed in the cloud."

Igou told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Gartner split spending on external IT services into five categories: systems integration, management of daily IT operations, consulting, staffing and cloud computing. Cloud services included software-as-a-service (SaaS), business services, application infrastructure services and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Approximately a third of the cloud spending went on SaaS, which includes email, office productivity apps and services like Salesforce.com. Business services, such as payroll and other cloud business process outsourcing, accounted for 20 percent of cloud spend.

Infrastructure-as-a-service, which includes virtualisation and access to servers, took up 16 percent of cloud budgets. Application infrastructure services, such as middleware and application programming environments, took 12 percent. The remaining 19 percent of cloud budgets went on other IT services, such as search.

Gartner did not break down cloud security services such as antivirus into a percentage of spend, said Igou. "Clearly there is evidence worldwide that not a trivial amount of spending is going on cloud services," he added.

Forty-six percent of respondents with budget allocated to cloud computing said they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers in 2011. Igou added that no figures were available to compare spending on cloud services with that in previous years.