Cloud Computing Statistics and Facts – 2024

Cloud Computing

If there’s one thing we can be certain about in the upcoming years, that’s the fact that some industries will take off, while others will hit a downfall. 

Over $300 billion in revenue were generated by cloud computing services in 2020.

Looking at all the latest cloud computing statistics, it’s pretty safe to say that this industry will only gain traction in the following decade.

90% of global companies are on the cloud.

When it comes to cloud adoption statistics, the numbers are also trending in a positive direction, which means that companies are rapidly realizing the benefits this technology can bring inside their organizations.

More than $1.1 trillion is the projected spending on IT services (including cloud computing) for 2021.

We’ll go more into detail about how fast this domain is rising and we’ll also check out some very interesting cloud statistics and fascinating facts.

Cloud computing growth statistics

All the news and analysis shows that people who got into cloud computing have made a right choice. They have secured long term jobs and high paying positions, because this industry is constantly expanding.

A 9% growth in cloud spending is estimated for the year 2021, as opposed to last year.

This increase will take the spending on IT services for this industry to a whopping $1.1 trillion. This growth is also heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies opting for cloud services in order to stay in business.

60% of workloads are hosted on cloud services.

As of 2019, more than half of all workloads conducted by companies were already on the cloud, as opposed to the previous years when 45% of businesses used cloud computing.

Over 94% of all global workloads will be hosted on cloud data centers as of 2021.

There’s less than 6% of company workloads that haven’t found a place for themselves on the cloud. 

$623.3 billion is the total estimated value of the global cloud computing market by 2023.

Based on the latest cloud computing industry analysis conducted by Report Linker, these numbers will skyrocket in less than 2 years.

The number of cloud services has tripled within a period of just 3 years.

The available cloud services, tools and applications went from 545 in 2013 to 1427 in 2016.

18% is the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for cloud computing services.

To put things in a better perspective, the industry was worth $272 billion in 2018, and now it has almost doubled. 

50% of people believe that the total cloud usage has been higher than initially planned, based on the COVID-19 pandemic.

When some industries struggle to survive, sectors like cloud services are thriving.

Over 600 millions of users have accounts on free cloud platform.

The top free cloud storage providers are iCloud and Dropbox.

$331 billion by 2022 is the projected revenue expected from cloud computing services.

These astronomic numbers will only continue to rise.

Cloud computing market size

Simply by reading any updated cloud computing report, we can draw the conclusion that this technology is becoming vital for any company that plans on surviving in this unpredictable economic environment. 

With a 32% share of the total market size, Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud service provider worldwide.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the private cloud market size, having the top position! 

13% of Amazon’s total sales are coming from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The world’s biggest online store owes a substantial part of its revenue to cloud services.

$124.6 billion is the total value of the public cloud market in the United States, as of 2019.

These numbers apply for the year 2019, as the relevant data for 2020 may not be so accurate due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estimates had $258 billion in generated revenue by public cloud computing services in 2019.

And now, the numbers are getting higher and higher, almost impossible to pinpoint. 

$555 billion in revenues was obtained by the global cloud services market in 2020.

That’s more than half a trillion in US Dollars! 

40 zettabytes of data have been located, shared, and transferred through cloud services in 2020.

Looking at these impressive cloud storage statistics, almost any company worldwide has had some form of data delivered or received through cloud services.

With 47.3% of the total market share, Dropbox is the world leader in cloud storage services.

Google Drive comes in second with a total market share of 26.9% and Microsoft OneDrive comes in third with a 15.3% total market share.

A new cloud server has the storage capacity to host 600 smartphones and 120 tablets.

Just to put things in a better perspective.

With 65%, Finland is the European country with the highest cloud adoption rate.

It’s followed by its neighbor, Sweden, with a 57% cloud adoption rate.

With an 11% cloud adoption rate, Bulgaria takes the last sport in the European Union.

Greece with a 17% cloud adoption rate and Romania with a 16% cloud adoption rate is right above Bulgaria.

TOP 10 biggest cloud companies

There are many cloud service providers out there, but these 10 companies are the world leaders in this industry.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services hosts approximately 4.7% of the world’s websites.

Microsoft Azure

Between 2018 and 2019, Microsoft Azure had a huge 72% spike in their total generated revenue, going from $7.56 billion to $13 billion.

Google Cloud

The Google Cloud Platform operated from 24 regions, 73 zones and had over 100 points of presence in 35 countries in 2020.

Alibaba Cloud

In 2019, Alibaba Cloud has seen an 85% increase in annual cloud revenue, as opposed to the previous year, reaching a total of $3.68 billion.

IBM Cloud

$23.38 billion was the total revenue of IBM Cloud’s software services in 2020.

Oracle

Oracle’s market share in the cloud computing industry is approximately 2%.

Salesforce

Salesforce is also the biggest player in the CRM applications market. It amounts to a total market share of 19.8%.

SAP

The SAP Cloud Platform plans on expanding at a 29.5% CAGR until 2028.  

Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Hosting has a total market share of 5.35% in infrastructure as a service industry.

VMWare

Apprximately 30% of IT professionals plan to adopt or to increase their workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS, in the next 12 months.

IBM paid $34 billion to purchase RedHat.

This is part of IBM’s efforts to gain a stronger market share in the hybrid cloud market.

Cloud adoption statistics 2020

The private cloud market share has seen substantial growth during 2020, when more and more companies decided to adopt cloud services for their operations to continue to work during the pandemic.

Almost 90% of enterprises are on the cloud.

That means that every 9 out of 10 companies use cloud services as part of their operations.

38% of workloads are handled in public cloud while 41% of them are in private cloud.

These numbers refer to the average company. They can choose between using public cloud (where services are delivered across the Internet), private cloud (it’s designed to be used internally by the organization that ordered these services) or hybrid cloud (when an enterprise decides to use both types of public and private clouds). 

58% is the total adoption rate for hybrid cloud in 2020.

It is estimated that 84% of companies which use cloud computing, have some form of multi-cloud strategy.

91% of companies have chosen to adopt public cloud.

While 72% are working with a private cloud solution.

$3.5 million on average per year is the total estimated investment amount in cloud services for companies.

In 2020, companies stated that cloud services take approximately 30% of their total IT budget.

36 cloud-based services are used daily by the average internet user.

You may not even know it, but you may be using more than one or two cloud-based services.

Cloud adoption by industry 2020

Each industry has its own specific needs, but if there’s one thing that all companies started to request during the COVID-19 pandemic, that’s cloud services.

12.2% of the total worldwide spending on cloud comes from professional services.

Discrete manufacturing takes up 11.8% and banking takes up 10.6%. These 2 industries all plan on investing at least $20 billion in cloud services and tools in the following year.

60% of companies are concerned about privacy and regulatory issues when using cloud services.

Governance and compliance of cloud services are two of the few major obstacles for this industry to be adopted at an even larger scale.

The banking industry leads in cloud adoption with 68% of experts saying that these types of services are vital for their line of work.

Given the high adoption rate for cloud services in the banking industry, it’s pretty clear that this sector will continue to be heavily financed.

60% of people from the banking sector say that cloud services are very important when it comes to “lowering banking costs”.

While 57% consider cloud services as vital for “banking for remote populations”.

With $19.7 billion invested in cloud services, the manufacturing industry is the world leader on this matter.

Professional services, with a total invested amount of $18.1 billion comes in second while banking lands the third spot with a total annual investment amount of $16.7 billion.

Cloud computing popularity statistics

When we break down the popularity of cloud computing based on country, the United States takes the cake in this category, being the world leader when it comes to using and adopting these types of services. 

TOP 5 countries that invest the most in cloud computing technology

  1. United States – $124.6 billion invested in cloud computing
  2. China – $10.5 billion
  3. United Kingdom – $10 billion
  4. Germany – $9.5 billion
  5. Japan – $7.4 billion
89% of all companies choose to work with SaaS.

SaaS refers to any applications which are easily accessible by a company’s clients through the Internet.

Cloud computing is the number 1 most in-demand skill on LinkedIn.

More and more people are looking for cloud specialists in their efforts to migrate their companies to cloud storage. 

Saas services alone will amount to $113.1 billion in 2021.

This just proves to show you just how big the spending on cloud services and cloud related protocols actually is.  

4 out of every 5 companies prefers using IaaS.

IaaS refers to a large area of computing resources which can be found in a virtual space, like cloud services, servers, virtualization and many more. 

IaaS has a 33.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate), making it the fastest-growing cloud spending service today.

PaaS is the second one with a total estimated spending that will go through a 29.8% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate).

61% of enterprises choose PaaS for their operations.

PaaS refers to the spaces where you can develop and test apps, in a closed environment, where only app developers have access. 

75% of the world’s total corporate workload will by SaaS in 2021.

Cisco’s latest reports indicate that SaaS will continue to dominate when it comes to cloud services.

67% of all companies have moved their infrastructure to a cloud-based one, as of 2020.

That means that the entire traditional work flow is witnessing a huge shift towards cloud services. 

48% of the United States federal and state agencies use various forms of cloud-based services.

This makes the United States the country with the highest cloud adoption rate.

47% of companies choose cloud services due to cost optimization.

These measures are really well received by executives, especially after a tough economic year (2020). 

Future of cloud computing 2025

The future of cloud computing looks bright. Really bright. Especially if we were to judge based on cloud computing market growth. However, there are still voices that are not so sure about using cloud services for security reasons.

75% of IT professionals consider that managing privacy and data protection is a lot more complicated in a cloud environment.

Most experts prefer handling the tasks at the office, on a designated device.

53% of companies are already planning on increasing cloud security inside their organization.

Along with top-notch technology, come top-notch hackers that may steal very sensitive data, causing millions and millions in damage.

70% of retail specialists predict that the industry will grow by 5 times from 2020 until 2025.

This just proves to show the bright future that cloud computing has in our day to day lives, as well as our professional ones.

$28.8 billion by 2028 is the estimated amount that cloud services will reach in the manufacturing industry.

That will happen if the industry will obtain a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth rate) of 7%.

Conclusion

If we were to sum up the entire cloud industry in just a few words, those words would be “this is the future”. We already have approximately 90% of all companies working with some form of cloud technology or another, so it’s just a matter of time before the rest will adopt it as well.

Even if cloud adoption statistics will show that the numbers will drop for a quarter, or even for a year, they will inevitably go back up within a couple of months.

You don’t need to be a scientist to look over all the relevant cloud computing statistics to draw a conclusion. It’s pretty clear that this industry is the new norm in business. It has become a staple of the way we work and how companies interact with one another.

What are your thoughts? How do you see cloud computing in the near future? 

FAQ’s

Who invented cloud computing?

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider is the inventor of cloud computing. Through his 1960s work on ARPANET, where he tried to connect people and data from all over the world, he is considered the inventor of cloud computing. 

What percentage of companies use cloud computing?

By 2021, an estimated 90% of all companies from all corners of the world were using cloud computing and cloud computing-related services and products.

What percentage of data is in the cloud?

Approximately 50% of all global corporate data is stored in the cloud, according to the latest numbers made available for the year 2020. In 2015, only 30% of the world’s corporate data was stored on cloud banks, and estimates show that the percentage will continue to grow.

How much money does cloud computing make?

$82,000 per year is the average salary for cloud administrators. The lowest 10% of employees in this industry earn an average annual salary of $50,000, while the higher 10% echelon earns an average salary of over $130,000 per year.

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