Public cloud revenue is expected to reach $186.4 billion, with continued revenue growth expected.
The trend toward multi-cloud adoption continues, and the demand for easy data transfer is expected to increase.

Gartner forecasts that the global public cloud services market will reach $186.4 billion in 2018, a 21.4% increase from $153.5 billion the previous year.

The fastest-growing segment in the public cloud services market is cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure-as-a-service, IaaS), which is expected to grow 35.9% to $40.8 billion in 2018.

Gartner predicts that the top 10 cloud service providers will account for 70% of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50% in 2016.



“As multicloud adoption grows, enterprises will look for easier ways to move workloads, applications, and data across multiple cloud providers’ IaaS solutions,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the largest segment of the cloud market, with revenue projected to grow 22.2% to $73.6 billion in 2018. Gartner projects that the SaaS market will account for 45% of total application software spending by 2021.

“SaaS users are increasingly demanding purpose-built offerings designed to deliver specific business outcomes,” added Nag Research.

The fastest-growing segment of the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) segment is Database Platform-as-a-Service (dbPaaS), which is expected to reach $10 billion by 2021. Hyperscale cloud providers are expanding their offerings to include dbPaaS.

“Large vendors have different strengths, and consumers generally expect that businesses can meet their current and future needs,” said Nag Research, adding, “However, to avoid lock-in, it may be worthwhile to look at third-party dbPaaS offerings.”

Public cloud revenue is growing much more robustly than initially forecast. Gartner forecasts that public cloud services will continue to grow steadily in 2018 and beyond.