New Delhi, The worldwide Public Cloud services market grew 26 per cent (year-over-year) in 2019 with revenues totaling $233.4 billion, according to a new International Data Corporation (IDC) report.

The Public Cloud services include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

The combined revenue of top five public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and Oracle) captured more than one third of the worldwide total market, growing 35 per cent year over year.

"Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

"Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to 10 years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time."

The public cloud services market has more than doubled since 2016.

During this same period, the combined spending on IaaS and PaaS has nearly tripled.

This highlights the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure and platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications as well as SaaS and digital application delivery.

According to Deepak Mohan, Research Ddirector, Cloud Infrastructure Services, cost optimisation and business resilience have emerged as top drivers of IT investment decisions and IaaS offerings are designed to enable both.

"The Covid-19 disruption has accelerated cloud adoption with both traditional enterprise IT organizations and digital service providers increasing use of IaaS for their technology platforms," he said.

SaaS applications remain the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019.

"Although growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, the current crisis serves as an accelerator for SaaS adoption across primary and functional markets to address the exponential growth of remote workers," said Frank Della Rosa, research director, SaaS and Cloud Software.

The IDC expects spending on IaaS and PaaS to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market over the next several years as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.