The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service – System Infrastructure Software (SaaS – SIS), and Software as a Service – Applications, grew 29.0% year over year in 2021 with revenues totaling $408.6 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.
"Organizations continued their strong adoption of shared public cloud services in 2021 to align IT investments more closely with business outcomes and ensure rapid access to the innovations required to be a digital-first business," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. "For the next several years, leading cloud providers will play a critical role in helping enterprises navigate the current storms of disruption (inflation, supply chain, and geopolitical tensions), but IT teams will also focus more on bringing greater financial accountability to the variable spend models of public cloud services."
Some highlights:
- The top 5 public cloud service providers (Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce Inc., Google, and SAP) captured nearly 40% of the worldwide total and grew 36.6% year over year.
- With offerings in all four deployment categories, Microsoft captured the top position in the overall public cloud services market with 14.4% share in 2021, followed closely by Amazon Web Services with 13.7% share.
- While the overall public cloud services market grew 29.0% in 2021, revenue for foundational cloud services* that support digital-first strategies saw revenue growth of 38.5%.
- IDC expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS elements) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as enterprises leverage cloud to overcome the current disruptions and accelerate their shift toward digital business.
