​Gartner predicts Australian public cloud spend to reach AU$7.7b in 2021

Gartner's latest public cloud services forecast has pinned Australian organisations as spending around AU$4.6 billion on public cloud services this year, with 2019 spend predicted to hit almost AU$5.6 billion.

Special Feature

Cloud Computing: Moving to IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service providers make a very compelling argument for businesses to stop running their own data centers and simply purchase server capacity on-demand and scale up and down as needed. This is our deep dive on IaaS strategy and best practices

Read now

The predicted 20.3 percent increase from this year is higher than the global growth rate of 17.3 percent.

The analyst firm predicts that Australian organisations will boost their spending on public cloud to AU$6.6 billion in 2020, and then to AU$7.7 billion in 2021.

Cloud application services -- or software as a service (SaaS) -- is predicted as generating the most revenue every year, with 2018 spend on SaaS totalling AU$2.6 billion and expected to be AU$4.7 billion by 2021.

Business process as a service (BPaaS) will also reach billion-dollar spending by 2019, with Gartner predicting 2021 spend to reach AU$1.1 billion.

SaaS represents the largest category of spending on cloud, but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest growing, with Australian organisations expected to spend AU$511 million this year on IaaS, AU$652 million in 2019, and then AU$1 billion come 2021.

According to Gartner, cloud providers are expanding across categories as customers demand offerings with more depth and breadth for their hybrid environments.

Globally speaking, Gartner predicts that by 2021, cloud revenues will total $278 billion.

SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market, with revenue expected to grow 17.8 percent to reach $85.1 billion in 2019, $99 billion in 2020, and $113 billion in 2021.

Spending on IaaS will total $31 billion this year, according to Gartner, with that figure expected to double to $63 billion come 2021.

BPaaS is likely to generate $50.3 billion in revenue next year, $54 billion in 2020, and then $58 billion a year later.

Around $28 billion is expected to be spent on PaaS in 2021.

With $10.7 billion spent this year, Cloud Management and Security Services revenues are expected to reach $16.3 billion in 2021.

PREVIOUS AND RELATED COVERAGE

Australia's transition to multi-cloud is outpacing global peers

After being the highest adopters of virtualisation, Australian organisations are also leading the charge to a multi-cloud world, according to VMware.

Commonwealth pushes public cloud by default

Spruiking a public cloud-first approach, the Australian government has lifted the lid off its new Secure Cloud Strategy.

What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about the cloud, explained

Updated: An introduction to cloud computing right from the basics up to IaaS and PaaS, hybrid, public, and private cloud.

2020: The magic year public cloud becomes more popular than on-premises (TechRepublic)

According to a report from LogicMonitor, 2020 will be the year that 41% of workloads are run in the public cloud.