All of us who work in Cloud services are aware that this market is still in a phase of accelerated growth and that more and more companies are taking the plunge into the cloud or, having already done so, are continuing to incorporate new workloads and processes into it.
We also see that the more technological the customer’s business, the more likely it is to adopt the Cloud, although it is by no means a technology that is exclusive to any particular sector.
Nevertheless, I think it is worth putting some numbers to that subjective feeling, and that is why I have reviewed the “Global Cloud Computing Market” report by the company Global Data, which was published this year. I will now summarise the most important conclusions of this report.
Cloud market continues to grow rapidly
Firstly, it confirms that those of us who thought that the Cloud market continues to grow rapidly were right, and it also shows that this growth shows no signs of slowing down. The size of this market was $543 billion in 2021 and Cloud market will grow to $864 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8% over that period.
Cloud market grows by the need for companies to organise, secure and manage a growing volume of valuable data
Asia-Pacific is the most important region in the Cloud market, but it is South America, however, where the highest growth in the Cloud business is forecast (CAGR of 17.2%). As a result, it is here where the greatest business opportunities lie. The need for companies to organise, secure and manage a growing volume of data from a wide range of sources and IT resources is at the root of these high growth rates.
Public, private and hybrid Clouds
Another fact highlighted by the report is that more than 61.6% of Cloud investment goes to the public cloud, 16.7% to the private cloud and 9.4% to the hybrid cloud (the rest of the market is divided between managed services and other cloud management platforms).
However, the trend over the next few years is that the highest growth will be in hybrid cloud services (14.3% CAGR), while the private cloud will show the lowest growth. In other words, more and more companies are opting for a hybrid cloud model that combines the advantages of public and private clouds.
Banking and insurance, the highest level of adoption
According to sector, the banking and insurance sector is the one with the highest level of adoption of cloud technology in 2021. However, it is the sectors where Cloud Computing currently has the least presence (construction, food and retail) that are expected to grow the most in the coming years and, therefore, where we can find the most business opportunities.
Spain, of course, is no stranger to these global market trends. As reflected in the report “Use of digital technologies by companies in Spain” published by the National Observatory of Technology and Society (ONTSI), 32% of Spanish companies claim to have used some cloud service in 2021, which represents a four-point increase over the previous year.
In Spain, however, there is a wide variation in the use of cloud technology depending on the size of the company, from 28% adoption among small companies to 68% among large companies.
Cloud Computing does is democratise access to technology, making it available to medium and small companies
This disparity stems from the mistaken belief that Cloud Computing is an expensive and complicated technology, available only to large corporations, when it is precisely the other way round: the essence of the cloud is to pay only for those resources that are really needed and used, so that small customers, who need fewer capabilities than large ones, pay much less.
As in other markets, Cloud Computing is most widely used in the most high-tech sectors in Spain, while more traditional sectors such as metallurgy and construction have a lower adoption rate, but at the same time a greater prospect of growth.
E-mail and file storage are clearly the kings of the services that companies upload to the cloud, although they are by no means the only uses of the Cloud, with database servers, security applications and financial, accounting and customer management software also standing out.
In short, Cloud Computing is an ever-growing market, a trend that is not expected to change in the coming years. It is key to the digitalisation of companies, many of which are already pursuing a “Cloud First” strategy for any digitalisation project. In other words, the digital transformation of companies will either be in the Cloud, or it will not.
