Enterprise organizations are dependent on the line of business (LOB) applications for their business success. It is not hyperbolic to say that the most crucial driver for the enterprise spend on IT infrastructure is ensuring business continuity of their LOB applications. IDC observes that the enterprise IT spend on public cloud infrastructure has been growing faster than the spend on traditional IT infrastructure. IDC also forecasts that the global spend on public cloud infrastructure to surpass the spend on traditional IT infrastructure by 2022.
As the spend on public cloud infrastructure is increasing, a few questions are raised:
- What are enterprise workloads?
- What are the top enterprise workloads deployed on public cloud infrastructure?
- Why is public cloud infrastructure the right choice for such workloads?
- How is the spend on public cloud IaaS and PaaS offerings segmented by enterprise workloads?
- What workloads are expected to grow on public cloud infrastructure?
- How does the hardware spend by cloud service providers translate into public cloud services revenue?
This blog post provides a sneak preview into our latest research – Public Cloud Infrastructure Spend Segmentation by Workloads, an industry first of its kind, that answers these questions.
What are Enterprise Workloads?
IDC’s Workloads Trackers(server and storage) and research track worldwide spend on infrastructure used to power enterprise workloads. IDC’s Workloads Taxonomy classifies enterprise workloads into seven categories and 18 types, as shown in the figure below. The infrastructure spend on these workloads is tracked across different deployment models, locations, application types, and more infrastructure specific segments.
IDC’s Public Cloud Services (PCS) Tracker tracks worldwide spend on public cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). The worldwide enterprise spend on public cloud services is growing at a faster rate than that on traditional IT infrastructure – in the year 2018, the worldwide spend on public cloud services (IaaS + PaaS only) spend was more than $62 B. With such a significant shift of enterprise IT spend towards public cloud, both vendors and end-users frequently ask us on the public cloud.
Exploring Top Enterprise Workloads
This research segments the public cloud services spend (IaaS, PaaS, IaaS + PaaS) across all enterprise workloads. The research also provides insights into how certain workloads provide better returns to cloud service providers on their investments on infrastructure. The following figure shows the top enterprise workloads deployed on public cloud infrastructure based on IaaS + PaaS spend in the year 2018.
Top Workloads on Public Cloud by Spend
- Structured Data Management, App Dev & Testing, and Data Analytics (Structured and Unstructured) were the top workloads by IaaS & PaaS spend on public cloud infrastructure for the year 2018.
- Structured Data Management, Structured Data Analytics, and Security workloads were the top workloads by IaaS spend on public cloud infrastructure for the year 2018.
- The entire PaaS spend on public cloud infrastructure was on a handful of workloads: Structured Data Management, App Dev & Testing, and Data Analytics (Structured and Unstructured), during the year 2018.
The primary drivers for the above workloads being top workloads on public cloud infrastructure include ‘Lift & Shift’ migration patterns, the beginning of the adoption of AI/ ML capabilities, and the growth of cloud-native applications and dev/ test use cases on public cloud infrastructure.
Fastest Growing Workloads on Public Cloud
- Data Management and Data Analytics workloads are expected to continue being top workloads on public cloud infrastructure, primarily driven by the ‘Lift & Shift’ migrations of legacy workloads, 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.
Workloads with the Best Returns on Infrastructure Spend
- In the year 2018, App Dev & Testing and Structure Data Management workloads provided the best returns on investments to cloud service provides on their hardware investments in the previous three years on IaaS + PaaS services.
- PaaS offerings provided higher returns on average than IaaS offerings.
Cloud services providers are starting to see returns on their investments enabling IaaS + PaaS services. With more workloads being migrated to public cloud infrastructure, we expect this trend to continue.
This research, being the first of its kind in the industry, answers pertinent questions on enterprise workloads on public cloud infrastructure. If you are a cloud service provider or an enterprise vendor, you may want to pay special attention to these top workloads. If you are an end-user, you may want to consider these workloads trends in prioritizing workloads during your cloud migration journey.
See more of IDC’s ground-breaking research; read “Public Cloud Infrastructure Spend Segmentation by Workloads” now:
