Cloud hardware investments now account for 30% of all IT spend

Nearly one-third (30%) of the money spent on IT infrastructure is being used to snap up cloud-enabling technologies, according to IT analyst IDC.

The latest version of the market watcher’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker shows the amount spent on hardware destined for use in cloud environments grew by 14.4% year-on-year to $8bn in the fourth quarter of 2014.

The IDC tracker monitors the proportion of server, disk storage and networking hardware that is being bought and deployed within cloud environments across the globe.

Such purchases now account for 30% of all IT infrastructure spend, which is three percentage points higher than this time last year.

The tracker also showed investments in private cloud infrastructure continuing to grow apace, with $10bn spent in this area over the past 12 months, which represents year-on-year growth of about 20%.

Meanwhile, he amount spent on public cloud infrastructure topped $16.5bn during the same period, up 17.5% on the previous year.

Richard Villars, vice-president of datacentre and cloud research at IDC, said that apart from the continued and growing interest in cloud technologies, much of this increase is being fuelled by the internet of things trend.

“The transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures within enterprises’ datacentres continues to accelerate, yet the expansion of public cloud infrastructure in service providers’ datacentres around the world is an even larger driver of IT spending,” said Villars.

“A key driver of this acceleration is organisations’ development and use of new internet of things services that require levels of agility and scale that only cloud services can deliver.”

From a supplier perspective, HP was the top provider of cloud IT infrastructure in 2014, followed by Dell, Cisco, EMC and IBM..