A new report from IDC has revealed that spending on public cloud computing will more than double by 2020, generating more than $195bn of revenues.
The research firm’s semi-annual worldwide public cloud services spending guide predicted that Western Europe will continue to make up one fifth of the worldwide market, with revenues increasing to $38.6bn in 2020 from $15bn in 2015.
The UK will remain the largest market in Western Europe, generating about 30% of the region's total revenues.
The next-largest markets will be Germany and France which, together with the UK, account for 64% of Western Europe's total revenues in public cloud services.
IDC associate vice president of software and cloud services trackers Bo Lykkegaard said: "Public cloud services have changed how European organisations evaluate and select software.
Lykkegaard noted that aspects like very fast rollouts, continuous upgrades, and ease of post-implementation reconfiguration are now top criteria for new application purchases.
He said: "Some European countries have started the adoption of public cloud services later than others, due to concerns related to information security, data location, solution availability, and other issues.
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“However, IDC foresees that the public cloud movement will sweep across all of Europe and that some markets of cautious adoption will outgrow the others over the next five years."
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was accountable for 66.9% of all public cloud revenues in 2015, and IDC expects it to remain the largest sector through to 2020.
But platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service revenues are anticipated to increase at a faster level than SaaS, increasing their market share by 2020.
IDC said the biggest cloud service adopters were discrete manufacturing, banking, and process manufacturing, which altogether, accounted for a third of total revenues.
Utilities, insurance and discrete manufacturing are projected to be the three fastest-growing markets in the next five-years, and IDC said each of the 20 industries analysed it are expected to more than double its annual cloud invests during that time.
