Public cloud spending is projected to soar globally, reaching a staggering $675 billion by 2024, according to a recent report. The cloud infrastructure and platform services sectors are witnessing the most significant growth in spending, with end-user expenditure on public cloud services projected to expand by 20.4 percent in 2024, surpassing $561 billion in 2023.
Gartner, Inc. has forecasted this substantial growth, attributing it to the rising adoption of generative AI (GenAI) technologies and ongoing investments in application modernization efforts across various organizations. The Vice President Analyst at Gartner, Sid Nag, highlighted the crucial role of GenAI in driving this growth, predicting that public cloud spending will exceed one trillion dollars by the end of the decade.
All segments of the cloud market are expected to experience growth in 2024, with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) anticipated to see the highest end-user spending growth at 25.6 percent, followed by Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) at 20.6 percent. The continued evolution of GenAI is driving the robust growth in the IaaS sector, reflecting the increasing demand for infrastructure to support AI model training, inferencing, and fine-tuning.
Despite the substantial growth in infrastructure and platform services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud market in terms of end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow by 20 percent in 2024, reaching a total of $247.2 billion. This growth is fueled by the modernization of applications by independent software vendors for SaaS consumption models.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, end-user spending on public cloud services is set to surge by 19.8 percent in 2024, reaching $7.3 billion. Companies in the MENA region are increasingly embracing digitalization, leveraging cloud technologies like AI and business analytics to enhance their capabilities. The overall trend indicates a shift towards becoming technology-centric, driving the adoption of cloud services as a critical enabler for innovation and growth.
