Remote Working Means Public Cloud and DaaS Spend Increase

Gartner has forecast continued spending on the public cloud and particularly desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) through 2020, fuelled by remote working during the pandemic.

Growth

The Gartner market watcher’s global public cloud services market forecast indicates that the move to home working necessitated by the COVID-19 shutdown has boosted spending on the public cloud and that it is forecast to grow by 6.3 per cent in 2020 to $257.9bn, up from $242.7bn last year.

DaaS

Although software as a service (SaaS) is expected remain the largest market segment, the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) segment, although relatively small, is forecast to experience a boost in spending (from $616m worldwide in 2019) due to the fact that it offers an inexpensive way for organisations with large numbers of remote workers to enable staff to securely access enterprise applications from multiple devices and locations.  This has proven to be particularly valuable during the lockdown and beyond. 

SaaS Growth

Gartner reports that the software as a service (SaaS) segment is still the largest, and this is likely to continue with a projected spike in spending of around 15.5 per cent between 2020 and 2021. The growth in SaaS tools and technologies spending has been driven in recent months by the increased need for new software collaboration tools during COVID-19.

IaaS

Gartner is also forecasting that the second biggest market segment, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), will grow by 13.4 per cent in 2020.

Public Cloud

The fact that public cloud services offer businesses cost scale with use and deferred spending advantages make a continued growth in public cloud spending more likely as economies try to bounce back from the effects of the pandemic.

Other Research

The Gartner findings and forecasts echo those of other researchers and tech commentators.  For example, back in June, IT asset management firm, Snow Software released the results of a poll of 250 IT leaders from around the world that focused on how the pandemic has affected their plans for use of the cloud.  The results showed that 82 per cent had increased their use of the cloud and the pandemic had driven 60 per cent to grow their use of off-premise technologies due to the necessary remote working.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown forced businesses to quickly adapt to having their employees work from home, using (cloud-based) software collaboration tools to communicate.  This lockdown, therefore, was the driver for many businesses to quickly ramp-up their use of the public cloud, and their increased spending on cloud infrastructure and technologies is likely to continue. Many businesses have also now realised the benefits of using the cloud e.g. cost, scale and deferred spending advantages.  Many businesses look set to move more into the cloud now that they have already seen how it can work, the cost and flexibility benefits, and how it could help them going forward as they and the economy try to recover at a time when spending on IT needs to bring maximum value and take account of the new world situation.