According to a report by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 20.4 per cent to total $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023. The report noted that this growth is being driven by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and application modernisation.
Commenting on the report, Sid Nag, vice president analyst, Gartner, said, “The continued growth in public cloud spending can be largely attributed to GenAI due to the creation of general-purpose foundation models and the ramp-up to delivering GenAI-enabled applications at scale. This growth trend is expected to push public cloud end-user spending to surpass the one trillion dollar mark before the end of this decade.”
It stated that all segments of the cloud market are expected to see growth in 2024, with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) forecasted to experience the highest end-user spending growth at 25.6 per cent, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 20.6 per cent.
Nag added, “IaaS continues at a robust growth rate that is reflective of the GenAI revolution that is underway.The need for infrastructure to undertake AI model training, inferencing, and fine-tuning has only been growing and will continue to grow exponentially, having a direct effect on IaaS consumption.”
While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, software-as-a-service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud market in end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 20 per cent to total $247.2 billion in 2024.
The report emphasised that SaaS spend is driven by applications being modernised by independent software vendors to run in a SaaS-based consumption model. Organisations are increasingly using cloud for specific use cases such as AI, machine learning, internet of things, and big data, which is driving this SaaS growth.
