Cloud computing to boom in 2011
Spending on cloud to grow five times faster than global IT spend...
Cloud computing will be one of the fastest growing IT markets in 2011, according to analysts.
A report by research company IDC predicts that while global IT spend will increase by six per cent in 2011, spending on public cloud computing services will grow five times faster.
Speaking at the Intellect Annual Regent Conference in London yesterday, Stephen Minton, VP of worldwide IT markets at IDC, said: "This will be a big year for the cloud… It will be a change in the way companies are doing their computing in the long term."
And while nervousness about security of corporate data may stop some businesses from moving to public cloud services, companies will increasingly run IT services on private cloud platforms in 2011.
Minton said: "The real opportunity is the growth of the private cloud," adding that there would be a demand for private cloud services while businesses "moved to widespread usage of the public cloud".
Cloud computing spending will be a fast-growing IT market in 2011, say analysts
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He predicted that many businesses would run services both from public and private clouds, depending on factors such as the sensitivity of the data being handled.
TechMarketView managing partner Anthony Miller said the cloud computing market would grow by a compound annual growth rate of 26 per cent between 2010 and 2014.
The analyst house forecasts that the UK cloud computing market, including application provisioning, will rise in value from £5.8bn in 2010 to £10.4bn in 2014 - with most of the spend going on the private cloud.
"We see cloud computing as a journey rather than a destination - a journey from taking assets on-premise to off-premise," Miller said.
The journey to the cloud will take place in several stages, he added, as businesses will move their applications, business processes, infrastructure and platforms into the cloud at different speeds.
Miller said moving to the cloud computing model requires changes to business practices - including a shift from long-term to transactional contracts, from product-delivery to service-assembly skills among staff and from fixed to variable SLAs.