The cloud computing market is forecast to reach $411bn by 2020 according to new research from global communications provider CenturyLink and Statista.
Today the global cloud computing market is worth $180bn in vendor revenues for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with the market growing by 24 per cent annually.
Businesses that take advantage of productivity-enhancing cloud services grow 19.6 per cent faster than their counterparts and 57 per cent of European enterprises view cloud services as “very important” to digital transformation.
By 2020, the cloud services segment in Germany is forecast to amount to $20.4bn and there is a great growth opportunity in France and Germany for cloud computing services with low adoption rates of 11 to 12 per cent.
When it comes to the reasons for using cloud technology worldwide, improved availability and resiliency is the top reason followed by improved agility and responsiveness and accelerated product innovation.
CenturyLink also found that organisations are increasingly using more than one cloud provider and 85 per cent of enterprises today have a multi-cloud strategy.
Despite growing cloud adoption worldwide, there are still a number of cloud adoption myths that need to be overcome.
80 per cent of IT managers are concerned about the performance and scalability of networking fabric in a cloud environment while 70 per cent of IT security professionals say it is more difficult to protect sensitive data in cloud computing environments as opposed to conventional security. Cloud migration is also viewed as a barrier to cloud by 33 per cent of those surveyed.
While many businesses have already turned to the cloud, those that have not will likely be persuaded to do so in order to keep up with their competition.
