Research group IDC has forecasted that the revenue for server hardware for public clouds will grow from $582 million to $718 million in 2014 and for the private cloud market, the growth will also be strong, moving from $2.6 billion to $5.7 billion across the same timeline. This complements data from this year suggesting that there will be a large increase in the number of organizations that adopt both public and private cloud models and further accentuates other data suggesting that out of organizations that have not yet made the leap to clouds of one variety or another, over half are considering the possibility.
The report notes that cloud computing has “lower ASVs than an average x86-based server” and that “public cloud seems less likely to be broadly adopted than private clouds and public clouds will be less enterprise-focused than private clouds” thus in other words, IDC has confirmed a trend that is emerging that shows public clouds and private clouds having different types of customers with workloads and policies that are more tailored to one or another. For example, a company dealing with highly secure information will be far less likely to even consider the public cloud when a private cloud will offer them the benefits of the cloud without allowing their sensitive information to leave the firewall.
In an interview, Katherine Broderick, research analyst in the Enterprise Platform and Datacenter Trends division at IDC stated that one reason for this growth is that IT departments are looking to the cloud to simplify “sprawling virtual and physical infrastructure” but that there is “still some lingering apprehension over issues like integration, availability, security and costs. These concerns, and how they are addressed by IT vendors will continue to guide the adoption of cloud computing over the next several years.”