Driven by the need to support remote workers and cut costs amid Covid-19, worldwide public cloud services market is likely to grow 6.3 percent in 2020 to total $257.9 billion, up from $242.7 billion in 2019, according to a Gartner forecast on Thursday.
Desktop as a service (DaaS) is expected to have the most significant growth in 2020, increasing 95.4 percent to $1.2 billion.
DaaS offers an inexpensive option for enterprises that are supporting the surge of remote workers and their need to securely access enterprise applications from multiple devices and locations.
Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $104.7 billion in 2020.
The continued shift from on-premises license software to subscription-based SaaS models, in conjunction with the increased need for new software collaboration tools during Covid-19, is driving SaaS growth, Gartner said.
The second-largest market segment is Cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 13.4 percent to $50.4 billion in 2020.
“The use of public cloud services offer CIOs (chief information officers) two distinct advantages during the Covid-19 pandemic: cost scale with use and deferred spending,” Sid Nag, Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement.
“CIOs can invest significantly less cash upfront by utilizing Cloud technology rather than scaling up on-premises data center capacity or acquiring traditional licensed software.”
Gartner said that Cloud spending in many regions is expected to grow rapidly as economies reopen and more normal economic activity resumes, with regions such as North America expecting to return to higher spending levels as early as 2022.
