Accelerated by Covid-19 disruption, the global spending on overall Cloud services will surpass $1 trillion in 2024, sustaining a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.7 per cent, according to a new IDC report.

The total worldwide spending includes the hardware and software components underpinning cloud services and the professional and managed services opportunities around cloud services.

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The strongest growth in cloud revenues will come in the as a service category – public (shared) cloud services and dedicated (private) cloud services.

This category, which is also the largest category in terms of overall revenues, is forecast to deliver a five-year CAGR of 21 per cent, accounting for more than 60 per cent of all cloud revenues worldwide by 2024, the whole cloud forecast from IDC said late on Thursday.

“Cloud in all its permutations — hardware/software/services/as a service as well as public/private/hybrid/multi/edge — will play ever greater, and even dominant, roles across the IT industry for the foreseeable future,” said Richard L Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

“By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned in the pandemic, most enterprises will put a mechanism in place to accelerate their shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services twice as fast as before the pandemic,” he added.

The services category, which includes cloud-related professional services and cloud-related management services, will be the second largest category in terms of revenue but will experience the slowest growth with an 8.3 per cent CAGR.

This is due to a variety of factors, including greater use of automation in cloud migrations.

The smallest cloud category, infrastructure build, which includes hardware, software, and support for enterprise private clouds and service provider public clouds, will enjoy solid growth (11.1 per cent CAGR) over the forecast period, the IDC said.

The Covid-19 pandemic has largely proven to be an accelerator of cloud adoption and extension and will continue to drive a faster conversion to cloud-centric IT.

“The adoption of cloud services should enable organisations to shift IT from maintenance of legacy IT to new digital transformation initiatives, which can lead to new business revenue and competitiveness as well as create new opportunities for suppliers of professional services,” the IDC report mentioned.

Hybrid Cloud has become central to successful digital transformation efforts by defining an IT architectural approach, an IT investment strategy, and an IT staffing model “that ensures the enterprise can achieve the optimal balance across dimensions without sacrificing performance, reliability, or control”.