Companies will invest 21.7 percent more in the cloud this year compared to the previous year. IaaS in particular promotes this growth.

By 2023, companies worldwide will invest around 597.3 billion US dollars in the public cloud. That’s what Gartner predicts. The figure represents a 21.7 percent increase over the previous year, when the market was worth $491 billion.

IaaS

Growth remains a given for all public cloud segments, but Gartner sees an outlier. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is expected to be the most attractive this year, growing 30.9 percent. With IaaS, you trust a cloud provider to provide the underlying infrastructure, typically including the hypervisor. This means that companies want to obtain virtual machines from the public cloud in order to operate and manage their own applications there.

PaaS and SaaS

In second place is platform-as-a-service, where the cloud provider also offers the platform. This is particularly interesting in the context of containers, where, for example, an integrated OpenShift solution in the cloud can be attractive.

Gartner also continues to see significant growth in enthusiasm for total software solutions in the cloud (software-as-a-service, or SaaS, like Salesforce), but that growth is slightly slower at 17.9 percent. The SaaS segment remains the largest, accounting for $197 billion of total cloud investments. More and more companies are already adopting SaaS, so it makes sense that growth is slowing down a bit.

Gartner estimates that by 2026, 75 percent of organizations will adopt the cloud as the foundation of their digitization plans. Unsurprisingly, hyperscalers are currently dominating the cloud agenda.