Synergy Research Group finds that enterprises are continuing to spend heavily on cloud infrastructure. This spending grew by 35% in 2020 to reach almost $130 billion. Meanwhile enterprise spending on data center hardware and software dropped by 6% to under $90 billion.
“This continued a decade-long trend of explosive growth in cloud and virtual stagnation in the market for enterprise-owned data center equipment,” stated Synergy.
In 2019 the two markets were almost equal in size, but in 2020, especially, the Covid-19 pandemic fueled the continued shift in worldwide IT operations. Over the decade, average annual spending growth for data center was just 2%, and for cloud services it was 52%. Cloud services includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and hosted private cloud.
