Cloud computing spending breaks all records in 2019

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Friday, October 16, 2020

AWS secured its leading position while Microsoft and Google witnessed remarkable growth in 2019. Canalys experts assume that the rate of spending on cloud infrastructure services will reach $284 Billion in 2024.

FREMONT, CA: According to a new report from Canalys last year, organizations worldwide spent a record $107 billion on cloud computing services.

Compared to the previous year, this year's spending on cloud computing infrastructure services was 37 percent higher, and Amazon's cloud computing division, AWS occupied a third of this year's spending.

With constant digitalization, businesses are spending more on infrastructure as a service (laaS) and their investments in storage, servers, compute, and other cloud-based services. Canalys experts assume that the rate of spending on cloud infrastructure services will reach $284 Billion in 2024.

Alastair Edwards, Chief Analyst at Canalys, in a press release, credited the increase in cloud computing infrastructure spending to the fact that many organizations outside the technology sector are transitioning to become technology providers, saying: "Organizations across all industries, from financial services to healthcare, are transitioning to being technology providers. Many are using a combination of multi-clouds and hybrid IT models, recognizing the strengths of each cloud service provider and the different compute operating environments needed for specific types of workloads."

Cloud Spending

As per Canalys' report, $34.6 billion has been spent by the organizations on cloud infrastructure, which is up from $25.4 billion the previous year. Simultaneously Amazon's market share increased a little from 32.7 percent in 2018 to 34.6 percent in 2019 with an annual growth rate of 36 percent. Microsoft Azure took the second position with customer spending 18.1 billion in 2019 up from 11 billion in 2018. Azure's market share increased from 14.2 percent to 16.9 percent in 2019, while the company's cloud computing division witnessed an annual growth rate of 63.9 percent.

Google earned the third spot outrunning Alibaba Cloud and other cloud providers with $6.2bn spent by its customers during 2019. Google witnessed a remarkable 87.8 percent increase in annual growth while its spending redoubled from the $3.3bn spent in 2018.

"The role of channel partners will become more important, as cloud use increases, in terms of defining application strategies, integration into business processes, optimizing user experiences, governance and compliance, as well as securing data and workloads," said Edwards while emphasizing the role that channel partners will play in the future of cloud computing.