New IDC forecast for public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) workloads puts worldwide revenue at $400 billion in 2025

NEEDHAM, Mass., August 5, 2021 – International Data Corporation (IDC) recently published a new forecast for the Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) markets, which includes revenue segmentation across IDC's 18 enterprise workload categories.

The combined Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS market is forecast to have revenues of $400 billion in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.8% during the 2021-2025 forecast period. Application development and testing, structured data management, and structured data analytics will be the largest workload segments by revenue share. Unstructured data analytics/data management and media streaming are forecast to be the fastest growing segments with CAGRs of 41.9% and 41.2%, respectively. Other business applications, file and print, and content applications will grow slower than the overall market average while still delivering double-digit growth throughout the forecast period.

"Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure continues to grow faster than traditional IT infrastructure segments," said Andrew Smith, research manager Cloud Infrastructure Services. "We expect all workload segments to grow in the double digits — some slightly faster than others — as enterprises emerge from 2020 and continue to prioritize workload migration and modernization using public cloud infrastructure."

Cloud IaaS and PaaS is a critical, enabling component for the future of digital infrastructure. The future of digital infrastructure is highly dependent on the ability of complex, connected cloud infrastructure to self-regulate and dynamically optimize itself in response to real-time changes in resource demand, application performance, and end-user experience. By 2022, IDC anticipates that almost half of an enterprise's products and services will be digital or digitally delivered, increasing the business' reliance on infrastructure (compute, storage, networking) to support more than traditional business applications. Timely access to innovative infrastructure resources — both shared and dedicated — will be imperative to sustain the adaptive, resilient, secure, and compliant digital business models of the future.

Additional trends driving workload growth within this market include:

• Public cloud services remain an essential part of enterprise recovery strategy as IT organizations reevaluate budgets, build infrastructure focused on business resilience, and work toward operating efficiently and managing risk in a post-COVID-19 world.
• Enterprises are shifting from workload migration to workload modernization on public cloud. In 2020, we saw IaaS buyers increasingly prioritize application modernization efforts, viewing modernization as an integral component of the move toward agile application delivery and cloud operations.
• Relentless enterprise data growth continues to push many workloads to the public cloud, as enterprises look to effectively manage data growth, as well as their IT budget. In many cases, cloud infrastructure and application platforms help meet this need by enabling agile and consistent scaling of capacity that can be utilized on demand.

The report, Worldwide Public Cloud IaaS and PaaS Workloads Forecast, 2021–2025 (IDC #US48032921), presents IDC's combined public cloud IaaS and PaaS forecast with worldwide revenue for IaaS and PaaS workloads over the 2021–2025 forecast period. The forecast is the first, public cloud-only segmentation of workloads by revenue, complementing IDC's existing workloads research for server ( Worldwide Server Workloads Forecast, 2020–2024: Investment Expands Despite the Ongoing Pandemic ) and storage systems ( Worldwide External Enterprise Storage Systems Infrastructure for Workloads Forecast, 2021–2025 ).