Infrastructure as a service tipped by Gartner to be fastest growing part of public cloud in 2016

• 
  Caroline Donnelly

  Senior Editor, UK
• Published: 25 Jan 2016 12:30

The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) sector of the public cloud market is forecast to experience the fastest growth in 2016, as enterprises continue to shift their datacentre assets off-premise.

That's according to Gartner's latest public cloud growth projections, which suggest the overall market is set to grow by 16.5% and will be worth $203.9bn by the end of 2016.

The IaaS market is on course to account for around $22.4bn of this, and will -- according to Gartner -- grow by around 38.4% in 2016.

While other parts of the public cloud market are currently worth more than the IaaS sector, Gartner predicts the growth of the latter will outperform all other areas of the market this year.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, attributed this trend to the fact that more enterprises are looking to wind down their datacentre investments, as part of a wider push to cut their overall IT spend.

"IaaS continues to be the strongest-growing segment as enterprises move away from datacentre build-outs and move their infrastructure needs to the public cloud," he said.

"Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success."