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In recent years, cloud computing has become a vital component for organizations looking to overhaul and modernize their digital infrastructure. As cloud adoption has grown, so has the cloud market. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting facts about the cloud market and some of the changes that we can expect to see in the future:

Public cloud services are skyrocketing

The public cloud is poised for tremendous growth, according to Gartner’s most recent annual market forecast. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, the global market for public cloud services is set to grow from $182 billion to $214 billion—an increase of 17.5 percent. Of all market segments, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is experiencing the greatest increase. Gartner predicts that spending on these cloud services will reach as much as $38.9 billion in 2019, growing more than 27 percent over the previous year.

The rise of the public cloud will only continue beyond 2019. By 2022, the market will reach revenues of more than $331.2 billion worldwide, with the IaaS segment more than doubling to $76.6 billion. Overall, Gartner expects the public cloud to grow almost three times as quickly as other IT services.

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AWS is dominating the market

Year after year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to overshadow its market competitors as the number one provider on the market. Since its debut in 2006, AWS has delivered a growing portfolio of cloud services. Focusing on everything from data storage to analytics, AWS has accumulated the majority of the market share and even kicked off some of the biggest cloud computing trends.

In fact, 67 percent of respondents to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Survey reported that they were using AWS for their cloud needs. As such, AWS also leads in cloud workload deployments among enterprise users.

AWS reached annual revenues of nearly $26 billion in 2018, contributing the majority of Amazon’s operating income for the entire year. With a number of new enterprise clients joining in the final quarter of the year, AWS is poised for additional growth in 2019.

The majority of workloads operate in the cloud

The cloud reached a major milestone in 2014, when Cisco reported that organizations had moved over half of their workloads into cloud environments. Cloud adopters have since turned even more of their focus toward migrating their workloads to the cloud. In fact, RightScale identified it as the second most essential cloud initiative among enterprise cloud users in 2019.

Workload migration has become so important for adopters because it helps these organizations expedite their time-to-market for their biggest digital launches. Moreover, it’s a more cost-effective way to optimize their IT resources, in comparison to on-premises workload management. These benefits will see 83 percent of workloads moving to the cloud by 2020, according to a recent study from LogicMonitor.

The cloud is vital for many government entities

Research from Unisys and the Center for Digital Government found that nearly half of all government organizations—at both the state and federal levels—have turned their focus toward the cloud. Of the government IT specialists surveyed, 32 percent said that their agencies were pursuing cloud adoption, while 14 percent more claimed that cloud adoption was in their futures. Gartner predicts that even more government organizations will deploy the public cloud by 2021.

Cloud computing began to take off among government entities after the implementation of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy in 2010. This set a new precedent for IT decision-making, encouraging federal agencies to consider the cloud before any other solution when ruling on future IT investments.

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Storage is one of the most popular cloud services

The majority of cloud adopters are leveraging this infrastructure to improve their data storage. Far more organizations use the cloud for this purpose than any other application. In a recent report from Cloudian, 87 percent of respondents said that they used some type of cloud storage solution. Of this total, 49 percent relied on services like Dropbox, while 40 percent adopted a software as a service (SaaS) storage platform.

The findings from this report suggest that most organizations are applying cloud storage for certain needs, such as sharing information and e-mail. However, general cloud storage is less widespread.

Cost is the No. 1 cloud concern

As cloud adoption had surged, an increasing number of organizations are struggling to optimize their cloud spending. According to RightScale, 84 percent of enterprise users identified the management of cloud spend as their most significant challenge in 2019. Meanwhile, 69 percent of small and medium businesses (SMBs) reported the same.

Concerns about cloud spend have caused internal IT teams to shift their focus away from such matters as migrating apps and managing deployments. Between 2018 and 2019, the number of enterprise cloud teams that are responsible for managing their cloud costs rose by 4 percent, to 68 percent of all organizations. It’s no wonder that “optimizing existing use of cloud services” to save money is of the utmost concern among cloud users in 2019.