A third of IT infrastructure spending will go on the cloud this year, reckons IDC in a new report.
The research firm calculates that investments in technology will leap by 20%-plus, driven by public cloud data center expansion.
Total cloud IT infrastructure spending (server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch) will grow by 21% year over year to $32bn in 2015, accounting for approximately 33% of all IT infrastructure spending, which will be up from about 28% in 2014.
Private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16% year-over-year to $12bn, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 25% in 2015 to $21bn.
For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4bn, up 18.7% year-over-year from $22.3bn.
Private cloud spending was just under $10bn, up 20.7%, while public cloud spending was $16.5bn, up 17.5%.
For the five-year forecast period, IDC expects that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a CAGR of 14%. Both public cloud and private cloud are expected to grow at the same CAGR.
By 2019, IDC expects cloud IT infrastructure spending to be $52 billion, or 45% of total IT infrastructure spend.
"The pace of adoption of cloud-based platforms will not abate for quite some time, resulting in cloud IT infrastructure expansion continuing to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market for the foreseeable future," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Manager at IDC.
"As the market evolves into deploying 'third platform' solutions and developing next-gen software, organisations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions."