Research outfit Gartner says Australia’s infrastructure as a service market surged to $1.4 billion in total revenue in 2020 up more than 40 percent compared with $1 billion in 2019.
Cloud behemoths AWS, Azure and Google Cloud account for 70 percent of the market as Australian companies and government agencies move at an increasing pace to public cloud.
Gartner said the increase was in line with the global IaaS market, which grew 40.7 percent to US$64.3 billion, up from US$45.7 billion in 2019.
“Australian organisations accelerated their commitment to public cloud in 2020 and are now investing to support new opportunities in 5G, cloud-native applications, AI and data analytics,” said Gartner research VP Michael Warrilow.
He said towns and cities across Australia, including regional locations in South and Western Australia were investing in public cloud to overcome the tyranny of distance.
Accenture MD for government and health, Ahmed Hassan told Computer Weekly Microsoft has invested heavily in Canberra to provide a dedicated environment for government and critical infrastructure which is paying off.
The move to public cloud was a response to Covid19 for which the pandemic served as a multiplier allowing CIOs to overcome reluctance to move mission critical workloads off premises.
As containerisation, desktop-as-a-service and edge computing become more mainstream they are driving additional cloud spending.
Hyperscale public cloud services providing scalability and elasticity have led to the stronger forecasts for cloud adoption as they increase their presence in the ANZ region.
But Gartner cautioned in an earlier report that the usage and adoption of cloud that served enterprises will evolve from serving pedestrian use cases such as infrastructure and application migration, to those that combine cloud with technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G and more.
