Cloud migration is showing little sign of slowing, in spite of global economic issues

A challenging macroeconomic situation may not be deterring businesses from cloud migration, with new Gartner research claiming end-user spending on public cloud services is set to grow 20.7% to a total of $591.8 billion in 2023. 

This represents a pretty sizeable jump from the $490.3 billion of cloud spending the analyst firm predicts for the whole of 2022,  and is also higher than the 18.8% growth it forecast for 2022.

Though all cloud computing segments are expected to see some growth in 2023, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending increase in 2023 of any sector looked at, set for a 29.8% increase.

What’s driving growth?

Commenting on the news, Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, said: “Once applications and workloads move to the cloud they generally stay there, and subscription models ensure that spending will continue through the term of the contract and most likely well beyond”.

In addition, Gartner predicts that platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) will also perform well, growing 23.2% and 16.8% respectively in 2023, due to factors such as “staffing challenges” and an increased focus on margin protection

“Current inflationary pressures and macroeconomic conditions are having a push and pull effect on cloud spending,” said Sid Nag. “Cloud computing will continue to be a bastion of safety and innovation, supporting growth during uncertain times due to its agile, elastic, and scalable nature”.

The data comes despite the fact that growth at many of the world’s largest cloud firms may be slowing. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which currently controls the largest chunk of the global cloud hosting market, reported third-quarter revenue growth of 27.5% in Q3, its slowest year-on-year rise since the company began reporting its finances separately in 2014.

Despite its resilience, the cloud computing industry is not immune from wider economic issues. 

Smaller data centers in the UK and Ireland have seen their margins significantly dented as a result of the energy crisis, with some sites seeing energy bills increase by as much as 50% over the last three years according to research by Aggreko.

• Want to rein in your own spending on cloud services? Check out our guide to the best cloud storage