Gartner’s latest report on the IaaS market suggests IT spend on cloud services shows no sign of abating. According to their new research, over 20 percent of IT budgets are now being spent on cloud services as many organisations look to the cloud for business critical operations.

The figures are certainly eye-opening. The worldwide infrastructure as a service market grew by 29.5% in 2017 to total $23.5 billion, up from $18.2 billion in 2016. Amazon was the top vendor in the IaaS market in 2017, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said “The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organizations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries

“Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20 percent of the total IT budget for organizations using cloud. Many of these organizations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations.”

The Unstoppable Amazon Juggernaut

Amazon was the clear leader in the research report with an estimated $12.2 billion revenue in 2017, up 25 percent from 2016. Amazon is also the most mature, enterprise-ready provider, with the strongest track record of customer success and the most useful partner ecosystem, claims Gartner.

Microsoft comes in second position with growth of more than 98 percent and revenue surpassing $3.1 billion in 2017, with Alibaba beating Google to third place with its 67 percent growth from the previous year.

Gartner attributes this growth in enterprise IT spending on customers migrating from traditional data centres to cloud IaaS, and also by customers implementing digital business projects, reflecting the broad range of use cases that cloud can cater for.