International Data Corporation published a new forecast for the worldwide public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) markets. The forecast includes revenue segmentation across IDC’s 18 enterprise workload categories.

The combined public cloud IaaS and PaaS market is forecast to have revenues of $400 billion in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.8% during the 2021 to 2025 forecast period. Application development and testing, structured data management and structured data analytics will be the largest workload segments by revenue share. Unstructured data analytics/data management and media streaming are forecast to be the fastest growing segments, with CAGRs of 41.9% and 41.2%, respectively. Other business applications, file and print and content applications will grow slower than the overall market average while still delivering double-digit growth throughout the forecast period.

“Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure continues to grow faster than traditional IT infrastructure segments,” Andrew Smith, research manager of cloud infrastructure services at IDC, said. “We expect all workload segments to grow in the double digits — some slightly faster than others — as enterprises emerge from 2020 and continue to prioritize workload migration and modernization using public cloud infrastructure.”

Cloud IaaS and PaaS is a critical enabling component for the future of digital infrastructure. The future of digital infrastructure is highly dependent on the ability of complex, connected cloud infrastructure to self-regulate and dynamically optimize itself in response to real-time changes in resource demand, application performance and end-user experience. By 2022, IDC anticipates that almost half of an enterprise’s products and services will be digital or digitally delivered, increasing the business’ reliance on infrastructure (compute, storage, networking) to support more than traditional business applications. Timely access to innovative infrastructure resources — both shared and dedicated — will be imperative to sustain the adaptive, resilient, secure and compliant digital business models of the future.

Additional trends driving workload growth within this market include:

• Public cloud services remain an essential part of enterprise recovery strategy as IT organizations re-evaluate budgets, build infrastructure focused on business resilience and work toward operating efficiently and managing risk.
• Enterprises are shifting from workload migration to workload modernization on the public cloud. In 2020, IaaS buyers increasingly prioritized application modernization efforts, viewing modernization as an integral component of the move toward agile application delivery and cloud operations.
• Relentless enterprise data growth continues to push many workloads to the public cloud as enterprises look to effectively manage data growth as well as their IT budgets. In many cases, cloud infrastructure and application platforms help meet this need by enabling agile and consistent scaling of capacity that can be utilized on demand.