IDC Study Identifies the Largest IaaS and PaaS Workloads on Public Cloud

A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study offers the first look at enterprise workloads leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities on the public cloud. The study found that IaaS and PaaS spending in 2018 was dominated by three workloads: Data Management, Application Development & Testing, and Data Analytics. Combined, these three workloads represented more than half of all IaaS and PaaS spending in 2018. This was primarily driven by enterprises migrating their strategic and business critical workloads to public cloud infrastructure, the availability of open source options on cloud, initial adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, and growth in cloud-native applications & Dev/Test use cases.

While workloads associated with business-critical applications such as CRM, ERM, SCM, and other back-office applications attract more spending, these workloads are consumed as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Similarly, most media streaming workloads are consumed as Digital Services (deployed on cloud-based infrastructure off-premises).

“The share of web server workloads towards IaaS/PaaS spend is not reflective of their install base on public cloud infrastructure as the vast majority of web serving workloads are used as a part of other business applications and not by themselves,” said Sriram Subramanian, research director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC.

Data Management and Data Analytics workloads are expected to continue being top workloads on public cloud infrastructure, largely driven by “lift & shift” migrations of legacy workloads, the availability of accelerated compute instances, and democratization of AI/ML capabilities. App Dev & Testing workloads are also expected to grow on public cloud infrastructure, driven by the adoption of cloud-native development practices, growth in cloud-native applications, and Dev/Test use cases.

“Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure is growing at a faster rate than on traditional IT infrastructure,” added Subramanian. “As enterprises migrate their strategic and critical workloads to public cloud infrastructure, we expect to see certain workloads growing faster than others on public cloud infrastructure. This provides opportunities to cloud service providers to invest in the right infrastructure and prioritize services to enable such workloads.”

The IDC report, Public Cloud Infrastructure Spend Segmentation by Workloads (IDC # US46172620), segments global spend on IaaS and PaaS in the year 2018 by enterprise workloads. IDC’s workloads research tracks worldwide spend on server and storage hardware to power enterprise workloads across multiple deployment models and locations. IDC’s Workloads Taxonomy classifies enterprise workloads into 18 workload types among 7 workload categories. IDC also estimates enterprise spend on public cloud infrastructure to exceed the spend on traditional IT infrastructure.