While there are clear security concerns with adopting public cloud solutions, a new IDC study, U.S. Public IT Cloud Services by Industry Sector: More Details on the Opportunity study, reveals that from 2009 to 2014, U.S. public IT cloud services revenue will grow 21.6 percent, from $11.1 billion to $29.5 billion.
So what's driving the growth of public cloud services?
IDC argues that the majority of public cloud services revenue will be driven by four markets: professional services, communications and media, discrete manufacturing and process manufacturing. Driven by a number of midsize companies that will adopt software-as-a-service, IDC argues that the professional services market, which is part of the broader services and distribution sector, is the "sweet spot of public IT cloud services."
Overall, the services and distribution sector, is forecast to grow from a $3 billion market today to $8.5 billion by 2014. At the same time, applications will drop to one-third of the market revenue infrastructure revenue will grow to 22 percent of revenue. Finally, heavily regulated industries that have to meet specific security compliance requirements such as government, banking and healthcare will predominantly use the public cloud for traditional every day applications like e-mail and messaging.
Although the healthcare vertical will make up less than 5 percent of the total revenue by 2014, Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, a program manager in IDC's Vertical Markets Research Group, said that it will "experience a high compound growth of nearly 23 percent through the forecast period," adding that "despite serious concerns about privacy, current healthcare reform and the rise of connected healthcare will lead providers to the public cloud for specific functions such as collaboration applications."
For more:
- see the release
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