Australian IaaS market to pass $1bn mark by 2020

Australian spending on public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is on track to grow by over 60% in 2016 to $621 million, Australian analyst firm Telsyte estimates.

The market is expected to continue this strong growth trajectory, reaching $1.05 billion by 2020. More than half of Australian CIOs surveyed by Telsyte plan to invest more in IaaS over the next 12 months.

Among organisations with more than 20 staff, fewer than 10% are not using any form of IaaS, and more than a third (34%) of Australian enterprises now have a cloud first policy which is outweighing restrictions on cloud use.

But despite strong growth in cloud uptake, only 30% of organisations are at the top two of the six levels included in Telsyte’s debut cloud maturity model for the Australian enterprise market.

“The use of cloud aligns well with Australian enterprise ICT and business priorities; however, we still have some way to go before most organisations are using cloud to its full potential,” Telsyte Senior Analyst Rodney Gedda said.

As well as public cloud services, Australian CIOs are also investing in private cloud technology, with 78% of enterprises having built or planning to build a private cloud. Enterprises are increasingly moving towards a hybrid model combining the two approaches.

“There are many applications where it still makes business sense to deploy on private infrastructure, but having the agility to pick and choose the right cloud service for any application is the big promise of hybrid cloud,” Gedda added.

In addition, 70% of enterprises are using or investigating the use of containers or operating system-level virtualisation technology, and nearly 30% are using some form of network-as-a-service, such as VPNs, firewalls and application acceleration technologies.

Image courtesy of NEC Corporation of America under CC