Cloud IT infrastructure spending grew by 14.4% year over year to $8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to the IDC who state that this accounts for 30% of all IT infrastructure spending, up from 27% on the previous year.
The report also shows that private cloud infrastructure grew by 18.3% year over year to $2.9 billion, while public cloud infrastructure spending grew to $5 billion which is 12.3% higher than one year ago.
For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totalled $26.4 billion which is up 18.7% year over year from $22.3 billion.
Private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7% year over year, while spending on public cloud was a larger by a distance at $16.5 billion, up 17.5% year over year.
Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacentre and Cloud research at IDC, said: "The transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures within enterprises’ datacenters continues to accelerate, yet the expansion of public cloud infrastructure in service providers’ datacenters around the world is an even larger driver of IT spending."
"A key driver of this acceleration is organizations’ development and use of new Internet of Things services that require levels of agility and scale that only cloud solutions can deliver."
However, despite these growth figures, Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts, believes that the figures don’t consider the cloud services which users have that aren’t being fully utilised.
Davies, said: "It’s interesting to see public cloud spending has increased to $16.5B (£11.69B) at the end of 2014, up by 17.5% on the previous year. But, what these figures fail to show, is that a large proportion of cloud users are paying for cloud services that they never fully utilise."
"According to some research of recent industry figures we conducted last year, companies were wasting around £1 billion a year on unused cloud capacity, and these recent figures from IDC show this level of wasted capacity is only increasing."
"This is because the prevalent model for IaaS is based on the use of virtual machines, where compute is paid for based on what is provisioned, but this is at best 50% utilised by typical workloads."
"However, recent updates to the Linux kernel mean containerised servers can now be offered to cloud IaaS customers, where they are only charged for capacity they actually use, rather than what they provision, and as a result this wasted IaaS capacity could be eliminated."
"The sooner the cloud industry unlocks the potential of containers, the quicker we will evolve to the next generation of the cloud, and the more customers that will benefit."
