The Clouds are getting bigger

Cloud computing will account for 24 per cent of the UK software and information technology services market by 2014 – if the forecast includes application provisioning (AP) – or in terms of cash, £5.8bn today, up to £10.4bn by 2014.

TechMarketView, the analyst firm, who carried out the ‘UK Software and IT Services Market Forecast’ report also gave quite a healthy rise in value to the UK cloud market, even if AP was not included - £2.4bn now, increasing to £6.1bn in four years.

The report predicts the cloud being brought in, in three waves.

Greenfield applications will be set up on the public cloud in the first wave – as the more ‘straight forward’ applications, it is not surprising that the report sees this as the area of almost instant growth.

"We expect that the public cloud market will grow much more rapidly than private cloud in the early years, as enterprises (especially SMEs) move ‘easy win' applications off premise.’

Private clouds are in the second wave – with soon to be ‘dated’ datacentres being converted. Due to the extra investment needed in infrastructure, installation and migration, the move to cloud privacy will be a slower one.

The final wave will be the migration of mission-critical legacy applications, which, going beyond 2014, will accelerate public cloud growth again. Every cloud (certainly does) has a silver lining – and they are only getting bigger.