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.
“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.
