Worldwide revenues from public cloud services expected to reach US$195 billion in 2020 – more than double 2016 amount

One day after a report suggested the global cybersecurity market is set to grow to US$202 billion by 2021, International Data Corporation (IDC) said that worldwide revenues from public cloud services are expected to reach more than US$195 billion in 2020 – more than double the 2016 number.

IDC said in a statement on Wednesday that the US$195 billion estimate “will be more than double the US$96.5 billion in revenues forecast for 2016 and represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% over the 2015-2020 forecast period.” On Tuesday, global market research store Research and Markets reported that the global cybersecurity market is set to grow from US$122.45 billion in 2016 to US$202.36 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 10.6%. The banking, financial services and insurance sector was expected to see the highest CAGR – 11.6% – during the forecast period “because of the increasing adoption of web and mobile applications, which are prone to advanced cyberattacks,” Research and Markets said.

The industries leading the way in public cloud services spending are discrete manufacturing, banking and professional services, representing nearly a third of total worldwide revenues in 2016, IDC said in its Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. The industries that will see the fastest revenue growth over the five-year forecast period are media, telecommunications and retail. “However, all 20 of the industries profiled in the spending guide will experience revenue growth of more than 100% over the forecast period,” said IDC, a global market intelligence firm.

The guide quantifies public cloud computing purchases by cloud type for 20 industries across eight regions and 54 countries.

“Cloud computing is breaking down traditional technology barriers as line of business leaders and their IT organizations rely on cloud to flexibly deliver IT resources at the lower cost and faster speed that businesses require,” said Eileen Smith, IDC’s program director of customer insights and analysis. “Organizations across all industries are now free to adapt to market changes quicker and take more risks, as they are no longer bound by legacy IT constraints.”

The United States will be the largest market for public cloud services, IDC said in the statement, generating nearly two-thirds of total worldwide revenues throughout the forecast, followed by Western Europe and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). Latin America and Asia/Pacific excluding Japan will experience the greatest revenue growth over the forecast period.

Cloud software – the service enablement of products in all three primary software markets: applications as a service, system infrastructure software as a service (which combine to form SaaS), and application development and deployment or platform as a service (PaaS) – was responsible for 83.7% of all public cloud revenue in 2015, with the remaining 16.3% belonging to infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

However, IaaS and PaaS revenues are forecast to grow at a faster rate than SaaS, expanding their share of overall revenues in the process, IDC said.

“Cloud software will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery over the next five years, growing nearly three times faster than the software market as a whole and becoming the significant growth driver to all functional software markets,” said Benjamin McGrath, IDC’s senior research analyst, SaaS and business models. “By 2020, about half of all new business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute more than a quarter of all software sold.”