Cloud computing will continue to drive growth in enterprise IT spending over the next five years

IDC, a world-renowned market research firm, today published a prediction report entitled Global Public and Private Cloud Storage Forecasting for 2011-2015: Realizing Public Cloud Service Providers and Private Clouds. The report argues that in the next five years, the rollout of cloud computing will continue to drive growth in enterprise IT spending in storage hardware, software and professional services.

The report mentions that spending on public cloud services providers for storage hardware, software, and professional services will continue to grow at an average annual rate of 23.6% between 2010 and 2015. The main reason for this is that both public cloud service providers and private cloud environment users need to invest in various infrastructures that support cloud computing and support the provision of cloud services externally.

IDC summarizes the five information needs that will drive growth in enterprise storage needs in the future:

Achieve the effective delivery of information and applications to Internet users.

2. Reduce upfront infrastructure investment (ie, cut costs and time associated with deploying new IT and computing infrastructures).

3. Minimize internal IT infrastructure investment related to spikes or unpredictable workloads.

4. Reduce or spread the costs associated with long-term archiving of information.

5. Achieve near-continuous, real-time analysis of large amounts of data generated by various customers, partners and machines.

RichardVillars, vice president of storage systems and execution strategy at IDC, said global public and private cloud storage spending will reach $ 22.6 billion by 2015. He said that despite current economic uncertainties, cloud server providers will spend the most on IT products and services as they continue to build their infrastructure and expand their service choices around the world.