Global spending on cloud infrastructure services increased 34% to a total of nearly $56 billion in the first quarter of 2022, driven by the need for resilience and flexibility as businesses grapple with on-chain issues supply and geopolitical upheavals, according to an analyst report published Friday. Canalys company.
Migration of workloads to the cloud, investment in data storage, and development of cloud-native applications have all been particular drivers of SMB (small and medium-sized enterprises) investment in the cloud, so that they are stepping up digital transformation projects, according to the report. But large enterprises have also increased their spending on cloud services – given infrastructure hardware shortages and the potential for future price increases among cloud providers, large enterprises have opted for hefty, long-term contracts to secure price discounts with AWS. , Azure and Google Cloud.
Canalys research analyst Blake Murray said digital resiliency is a key consideration for businesses of all sizes investing in the cloud infrastructure market – and specialized cloud expertise is becoming an increasingly common commodity. more valuable.
Digital resilience is key to facing market challenges
“The cloud has remained a hot market and transformation strategies emphasize digital resilience to meet the market challenges of today and tomorrow,” he said in a statement. “To be effective in planning for resilience, customers turn to channel partners with the technical and consulting skills to help them effectively adopt hyperscaler cloud services.”
As a result, cloud-focused certification programs have proliferated, and major systems integrators like Accenture, Deloitte, and Tech Mahindra have all recruited employees with significant cloud engineering experience.
According to Canalys, global spending on cloud infrastructure has been relatively stable over the past four years – the low point in this period was the second quarter of 2020, the first pandemic quarter, when growth was just over 30% year-on-year. . , but recent quarters have all seen numbers close to 35%.
On the vendor side, the big three vendors accounted for 62% of all cloud spend in Q1 2022. The clear leader was AWS, which alone accounted for 33% of total cloud spend, followed by Azure at 21 % and Google Cloud at 8%. Despite its smaller overall market share, however, Google Cloud has grown the fastest among the big three, increasing its share by 54% in the last quarter, continuing to focus on analytics, cybersecurity, and security. AI, among other areas, and building regional data centers around the world.
