The Covid-19 pandemic will continue to drive a faster conversion to cloud-based IT – and according to a new analysis from IDC, the market for cloud services and the wider ecosystem around it could top $1 trillion by 2024.

The findings, from the analyst firm’s Worldwide Whole Cloud Forecast 2020-2024 report, identifies opportunities beyond public cloud services, including dedicated cloud services, enterprise private cloud infrastructure, cloud service provider build and support, and mixed deployment models.

Cloud ‘as a service’ models, be they public or dedicated, will see the strongest growth in revenues during the allotted period, as well as the most overall revenues. IDC forecast a five-year CAGR of 21.0%, with ‘as a service’ contributing more than 60% of all cloud revenues worldwide by 2024.

The wider services market, including cloud-based professional services and management services – in other words, consultants, compliance and monitoring – will be the second largest source of revenue, albeit at a growth rate of 8.3% CAGR. IDC noted greater use of automation in cloud migrations being responsible for the slower uptick.

IDC also explored the reasons behind Covid-19 accelerating cloud and digital transformation. Hybrid cloud is especially cited on this front, enabling organisations to ‘define an IT architectural approach, IT investment strategy, and staffing model that ensures the enterprise can achieve the optimal balance across dimensions without sacrificing performance, reliability, or control’, the company said.

Plenty of research and analysis has already been cast on how the pandemic has changed companies’ thinking around cloud investments. IDC itself noted back in June that even at the height of lockdown, cloud spending was still ticking over while non-cloud equivalents fell off a cliff. The KPMG Enterprise Reboot report, in September, found hybrid and multi-cloud was a key cost-cutter in many organisations’ strategies, with more than half (56%) saying cloud migration had become ‘an absolute necessity’ in the midst of Covid-19.

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

You can find out more about the Worldwide Whole Cloud forecast here.

Photo by Jean Gerber on Unsplash

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