WW IT Infrastructure for Public Cloud Deployments Up 15% Y/Y in 2017 – IDC

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation‘s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, total spending on IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches) for deployment in cloud environments will increase 15.3% year over year in 2017 to $41.7 billion.

Public cloud datacenters will account for the majority of this spending, 60.5%, while off-premises private cloud environments will represent 14.9% of spending. On-premises private clouds will account for 62.3% of spending on private cloud IT infrastructure and will grow 13.1% year over year in 2017.

WW Cloud IT Infrastructure Market Forecast by Deployment Type – 2015-2021
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Investments in cloud IT infrastructure will increase across all regions while the majority of regions expect to see a reduction in spending on non-cloud deployments across all three technology segment. Overall, worldwide spending on traditional, non-cloud, IT infrastructure will decline 5.3% in 2017. However, it will still account for the largest share, 57.9%, of end user spending.

Note: All figures above exclude double counting between server and storage.

In cloud environments, Ethernet switches will be the fastest growing technology segment at 21.8% year over year growth in 2017, while spending on servers and enterprise storage will grow 17.9% and 10.7%, respectively. (These growth rates include double counting between server and storage to fully represent each of the technology segments).

An important factor in the slowdown of spending on enterprise storage is the weakness in the external storage segment amid continuous adoption of server-based and software-defined storage solutions. In all three segments, spending on IT infrastructure deployed off-premises will be growing faster than spending on on-premises environments.

Long term, IDC expects spending on off-premises cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a five-year CAGR of 11.7%, reaching $47.2 billion in 2021. Public cloud datacenters will account for 80.4% of this amount. Combined with on-premises private cloud, overall spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow at an 11.4% CAGR and will surpass spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure by 2020. Spending on on-premises private cloud IT infrastructure will grow at a 10.3% CAGR, while spending on non-cloud IT (on-premises and off-premises combined) will decline at a 3% CAGR during the same period.

“After the slowdown seen in 2016, we expect to see spending on IT infrastructure for public cloud deployments return to double-digit growth in 2017,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research director, storage systems. “Growing demand for access to agile IT resources and proliferation of next generation workloads will continue driving adoption of cloud-based services. In turn, this move leads to a shift in IT infrastructure spending from traditional enterprise on-premises deployments to datacenters delivering cloud services and corporate private clouds.”