While in 2013, around US$ 22.3 billion were spent on servers, disk storage and Ethernet switches, in 2014, this figure was US$ 26.4 billion, up 18.7%. Expenditure on private clouds was just below US$ 10 billion, representing an increase of 20.7%, while companies spent US$ 16.5 billion on public cloud infrastructures, 17.5% more than in the previous year.
The latest IDC market analysis, which reported these figures, anticipates investments in technical equipment for the cloud to increase further in 2015 to US$ 32 billion, 28% more than in 2014 (that is, around a third of total expenditure on IT infrastructure). US$ 12 billion of this is expected to be spent on private clouds, which would signify a 16% increase. At the same time, investments in public clouds are expected to rise by 25% to US$ 21 billion.
If these figures are broken down by region, heavy investment is in particular likely to be seen in Western Europe. IDC estimates that expenditure on cloud infrastructure in this region will increase by 32%, followed by 23% in Latin America, 22% in Japan and 21% in the US. (Source: IDC/rf)