Worldwide public cloud revenue to grow 17% in 2020: Gartner

The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17 per cent in 2020 to total USD 266.4 billion, up from USD 227.8 billion in the previous calendar year, according to Gartner, Inc.

"At this point, cloud adoption is mainstream," Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner, said in a statement.

"The expectations of the outcomes associated with cloud investments therefore are also higher. Adoption of next-generation solutions are almost always 'cloud-enhanced' solutions, meaning they build on the strengths of a cloud platform to deliver digital business capabilities," he said.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest market segment, which is forecast to grow to USD 116 billion next year due to the scalability of subscription-based software, the research firm said.

The second-largest market segment is cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which will reach USD 50 billion in 2020.

IaaS is forecast to grow 24 per cent year over year, which is the highest growth rate across all market segments.

This growth is attributed to the demands of modern applications and workloads which require infrastructure that traditional data centres cannot meet, Gartner said in the statement.