Enterprise spending on cloud services and infrastructure will grow to $591.4bn by 2024, up from $398.0bn in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8%, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

According to the company’s latest report, ‘Thematic Research: Cloud Computing’, cloud computing’s importance has grown significantly in recent years. The cloud is now the dominant model for delivering and maintaining enterprise IT resources, including hardware, software, and platforms and tools for application developers.

Cloud computing provides users with an approach to consuming IT that is significantly more flexible, resource-efficient, and cost-effective compared to traditional IT. Cloud-based IT resources can be delivered privately, for use by one or a specific group of enterprises, or publicly, where IT resources are accessed according to multi-tenancy principles. Hybrid cloud environments, which combine the use of both public and private cloud, are becoming increasingly popular among enterprises that aim to enjoy the benefits of both.

Chris Drake, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, commented: ‘‘Key technology trends impacting the market for cloud services, infrastructure, and professional services include the growth of investments in infrastructure automation, DevOps, application lifecycle management (ALM), and edge computing.’’

In addition, the upheaval created by COVID-19, and the realization that cloud services are essential to business continuity, will launch a new era of cloud modernization. With companies all over the world now faced with the need to support a remote workforce indefinitely, cloud architectures will have to evolve in order to safely accommodate a rapid scaling of users and features while providing greater resilience and reliability.

With cloud services now delivering collaboration solutions on a massive scale, companies that would previously never have contemplated allowing so many of their employees to work from home have been forced to rethink their position. The wider, necessary move to the cloud will now pose questions for organizations about their future consumption of IT resources. Some may already have concluded that, if they can run virtually now, they can do it permanently. Drake continued: “For now, cloud infrastructure has held up remarkably well, but the extent of the COVID-19 pandemic, and organizations’ response to it, requires cloud providers to effectively stress-test their solutions, to ensure that they are ready for when the next pandemic or other crisis hits.”