The prediction presents both opportunity and major challenges.
New cloud forecast data from Synergy Research Group shows that worldwide revenues from cloud and SaaS services will grow at an average annual rate of 23% to 29% over the next five years, passing the $200 billion milestone in 2020, which will help to pull through 11% annual growth in sales of infrastructure to hyperscale cloud providers. Meanwhile, revenues from the sale of hardware and software to enterprise data centers will continue to slowly decline, reflecting the ongoing shift in workloads from privately owned infrastructure to the public cloud. Across the major cloud service categories, public IaaS/PaaS will see the strongest growth at an average 29% per year, while managed or hosted private cloud service revenues will grow by 26% per year and enterprise SaaS 23%.