64 Significant Cloud Computing Statistics for 2024: Usage, Adoption & Challenges

Cloud computing has gone a long way to becoming the most preferred way of accessing software tools, documents, and other files over the internet. From small businesses and freelancers to large enterprises and supranational organizations, this flexible and cost-effective way of delivering computing services continues to gain popularity worldwide.

The “cloud” is expected to grow faster in the years to come. This is mainly due to the significant shift toward remote work as a result of COVID-19. To provide you with a better appreciation of this wonderful technology, here are some of the most notable cloud computing statistics.

COVID-19 Cloud Computing Statistics

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled organizations everywhere to quickly alter the way they operate to enable their workforce to work remotely. Thanks to cloud computing, this otherwise difficult, time-consuming, and capital-intensive activity was made easier and faster. Here are some key statistics on how the pandemic has impacted organizations’ cloud computing usage and spending.

• Cloud spending across industries had increased by 37% during the first quarter of 2020, totaling $29 billion. (Synergy Research, 2020)
• In terms of impact per industry, the financial services sector, which is expected to handle 30% of global corporate payments by 2023, is predicted to have higher technology and cloud spending CAGR for the same period, at 4.73%. (PwC, 2020)
• On the other hand, government and public sector services’ technology and cloud spending are forecasted to have a 3.11% CAGR for 2019 to 2024. (PwC, 2020)
• To adapt to the changing environment brought about by COVID-19, 50% of employers said they expect a higher-than-planned cloud usage in the coming years. (Flexera, 2020)

COVID-19 accelerated the inevitable

• Another study found that around 87% of respondent employers are intending to hasten their migration to the cloud due to COVID-19. (LogicMonitor, 2020)
• In the same study, 68% of business organizations are utilizing at least two cloud providers to facilitate their migration to the cloud. (LogicMonitor, 2020)
• For the part of employees, around 70% of them are enthusiastic about the changes in their workplace due to the pandemic, including the shift to remote work for most jobs. (PwC, 2020)
• Meanwhile, it only took 14 hours for Huawei and Huiying to connect an AI-enabled auxiliary diagnostic system to two local hospitals, making it the first country in Latin America to have one. This system can generate CT quantification results in a matter of seconds. (China Daily/Asia News Network, 2020)

General Cloud Computing Statistics

The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered a new fact—the cloud is essential to keeping businesses operational. From virtual conferences to new work-from-home employees, companies only need to accept this new reality to survive and thrive in the new business normal. Here are the key statistics of the cloud computing market:

• In 2019, the worldwide cloud computing market size was approximately $266.0 billion. In 2020, it was estimated to be around $289.7 billion. (GVR, 2020)
• The global cloud market continues to be dominated by tech giants Amazon (32%), Microsoft (18%), Google (8%), IBM (5%), Alibaba (5%), Salesforce (3%), Oracle (2%), Tencent (2%), and Rackspace (2%). (Synergy Research, 2020)
• Cloud computing’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market segment is predicted to reach $138.3 billion, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market $82.2 billion, and the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) $69 billion by 2022. (Statista, 2021)
• According to 74% of global IT decision-makers, 95% of all workloads will be in the cloud within the next five years. (LogicMonitor, 2020)
• Meanwhile, a study found that 60% of surveyed organizations say a majority of their IT will be off-premise within the next two years. (MacDonald, 2018)
• As of Q1 2020, 56% of US small business owners spent as much as $600,000 annually on public cloud expenses. (Flexera, 2020)
• Likewise, it was predicted that by 2020, 78% of small businesses would have completely adopted cloud computing in their operations. (Flexera, 2020)
• In addition, 84% of small business owners think that cloud services is important to their operations and overall performance. (SBEC & TechnoMetrica, 2020)

Top Cloud Countries

• Back in 2019, China was estimated to spend around $13 billion on public cloud services, which is the biggest in the Asia-Pacific region. (Enterprise Creation Network, 2019)
• In 2021, China’s cloud services market is predicted to be worth approximately 111 billion yuan or $17.09 billion. (Enterprise Creation Network, 2019)
• Meanwhile, the UK cloud market’s SaaS is its biggest segment, valued at $9.9 billion in revenue in 2020, while PaaS accounts for 20% and IaaS for 13%. (Statista, 2021)
• In a December 2019 survey, approximately 36% of business enterprises in Japan reported that all their departments have already migrated to the cloud. However, around 7% are not aware of what the cloud is. (MIAC-Japan, 2019)
• Over in Germany, cloud spending was estimated to be more than $8 billion in 2020. (BuddeComm, 2020)

As businesses and public agencies migrate to the cloud, emerging SaaS trends indicate that this fast-growing segment is likely to offer more innovative and far disruptive technologies in the coming years.

Cloud Gaming Statistics

Also called gaming-as-a-service or gaming on-demand, cloud gaming allows gamers to play their favorite games remotely via the cloud. Since it was first unveiled in the Entertainment Software Association’s E3 in 2000, cloud gaming has grown in leaps and bounds, making it one of the most lucrative cloud services markets.

• The cloud gaming market is expected to balloon from $585 million in 2020 to over $200 billion by 2023. (Fernades, 2020)
• From 2020’s overall revenues, more than two-thirds are forecast to be generated from North America (39%) and Europe (29%). (Fernades, 2020)
• By 2027, the global cloud gaming market size is expected to reach $7.24 billion, at a 47.9% CAGR. (GVR, 2020)
• Meanwhile, in 2020, in-game transactions (primarily via mobile) generated the highest revenues (74%), followed by full-game digital (12%), full-game boxed (9%), and console subscription (4%). (Fernades, 2020)
• Driven by the widespread lockdowns, the mobile games market generated $77.2 billion in revenues for 2020, which is a 13.3% increase versus the previous year. (Gu, 2020)
• The in-game-advertising market was predicted to reach $77.2 billion, also in 2020. (Gu, 2020)

Is it heavenlike to play in the Cloud?

• The number of gamers worldwide was 2.7 billion across all regions in 2020. Of these, 0.8 billion are console gamers, 1.3 billion are PC gamers, and 2.5 billion are mobile gamers. (Wijman, 2020)
• As predicted, the Asia-Pacific region had the most number of gamers, at 1.4 billion, in 2020. (Wijman, 2020)
• The number of mobile gamers is expected to further increase as there will be around 4.1 billion smartphone users in 2023. (Gu, 2020)
• Apple’s App Store’s mobile games revenue was predicted to reach $38.8 billion in 2020, which is around half of the total worldwide. (Gu, 2020)
• In second place is Google Play, which captured 36% of the mobile games market, generating $27.8 billion in 2020. (Gu, 2020)

The entire cloud gaming service industry is expected to sustain its continuous growth through constant innovation. And with the eventual global rollout of 5G technology, cloud gaming’s growth is expected to further accelerate.

Usage and Adoption of Cloud Computing Statistics

One of the most prevalent ways for companies to utilize cloud services is to take advantage of the various “as-a-service” options available from many of the world’s largest tech companies. These services provide organizations with access to computing power, software, and other cloud-related functions without the need for in-house hardware.

• The worldwide cloud services market generated its highest revenue ever for only a three-month period. For the first quarter of 2020, revenues by segment were $124 billion for SaaS, $85.4 billion for IaaS, and $50.8 billion for PaaS. (ITCandor, 2020).
• At present, approximately 5 billion people access and store data on the cloud and their devices. (Cybersecurity Ventures/ArcServe, 2020)
• 87% of enterprises have implemented a have a hybrid cloud strategy, while 93% are using a multi-cloud approach. (Flexera, 2020)
• In terms of cloud type, companies use an average of 2.2 private clouds and 2.2 public clouds. (Flexera, 2020)
• And in the coming 12 months or so, over 50% of enterprise data and workloads are forecast to be in a public cloud. (Flexera, 2020)
• By 2025, IT executives expect that 30% of business workloads will reside in the private cloud, while 28% will be in the public cloud. (LogicMonitor, 2020)
• Meanwhile, 20% of businesses spend over $12 million on public cloud annually. (Flexera, 2020)

How are organizations using the cloud?

• In 2020, around 76% of IT professionals from industries worldwide report that their companies were presently running apps via AWS, while another 12% are experimenting with their apps also on AWS. (Flexera, 2020)
• The second top cloud service for 2020, where 63% of IT experts run their apps was Microsoft’s Azure. (Flexera, 2020)
• In the meantime, the top initiative among enterprises is how to optimize their cloud usage as expressed by 73% of responding organizations. Cost savings had been the top initiative for the past four years. (Flexera, 2020)
• In terms of cloud metrics, 77% of businesses utilize cost savings and efficiency as their top KPI for measuring cloud performance. (Flexera, 2020)
• Elsewhere, the cloud gaming market, which stores data in the cloud, is projected to increase ten-fold from 2017 to 2023. The full implementation of 5G technology is expected to drive this further growth until 2030. (Marvin, 2020)

Cloud Computing Challenges Statistics

All technologies despite their proven efficiency and maturity will have issues to address. Here are the major challenges to cloud services.

• A study found that the top cloud security challenges include misconfiguration of the cloud platform/wrong setup (68%), unauthorized access (58%), insecure interfaces/API (52%), hijacking of accounts, services, or traffic (50%), and external sharing of data (43%). (CheckPoint, 2020)
• Likewise, the same study found that 75% of enterprises are either very concerned or extremely concerned about how secure they are in the cloud. (CheckPoint, 2020)
• Another survey found that cloud security is indeed a top concern, as 9 out of 10 cybersecurity experts agree on its importance. (Crowd Research Partners, 2018)
• According to the 2020 State of the Cloud Report, the top three challenges for enterprises are security (83%), managing cloud spend (82%), and governance (79%). (Flexera, 2020)
• In the same report, business owners say that around 30% of cloud spend goes to waste. (Flexera, 2020)
• Likewise, it also found that cloud challenges vary in terms of user maturity. For instance, managing cloud spend is the main challenge among advanced users, while the lack of expertise/resources is the top challenge for beginners. (Flexera, 2020)
• Nonetheless, across all users, 61% of organizations indicated their intention to focus on their cloud migration efforts. (Flexera, 2020)
• In addition, 56% of organizations cited the challenge of understanding the cost implications of software licenses. (Flexera, 2020)

These statistics are among the reasons why choosing a cloud security provider is considered a must among businesses that extensively use the cloud for business purposes.

Milestones in Cloud Computing Statistics

Being one of the biggest technology markets in the world today, it is but worthwhile to know some of the turning points in the history of the cloud.

• The oldest precedent to what the cloud is today was J.C.R. Licklider’s concept of an “intergalactic computer network” in the 1960s. (Internet Society, 2021)
• Then in 1999, Salesforce.com (initially, “Force.com”) was launched as the pioneering SaaS, which means the delivery of business apps via the cloud. (Salesforce, 2019)
• The next major development in the cloud’s history was the launching of Amazon Web Services in 2006. (Marks, 2018)
• In 2008, Microsoft announced that it will join the already thriving cloud market. It finally pushed through in 2010 when it launched its Azure platform. (Kommalapati, 2010)
• In 2009, IBM’s LotusLive was launched, which was renamed IBM SmartCloud. In the same year, the company also offered its first IaaS, the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud. (Boulton, 2009)

• OnLive was the first major cloud gaming service. It was launched in June 2010. (Biggs, 2010)
• By 2012, Google officially joined the cloud market through its Google Compute Engine, which was released in 2013 as part of the Google Cloud Platform. (Lawler, 2012)
• In 2018, more and more business applications became cloud-native. (Bartoletti, 2019)
• In 2019, experts predicted that 2020 will be the year when enterprise apps will migrate to the cloud (Bartoletti, 2019). The pandemic, though unexpected, was in part a significant force in this migration.
• According to the 2020 Data Attack Surface Report, the total data that will be stored in the cloud will reach 100 zettabytes—or 50% of all the data in the world—by 2025. (Morgan, 2020)
• 2023 will mark a major milestone for the global games market. In this year, the global number of players will surpass the three-billion mark, representing a CAGR (2015-2023) of +5.6%. (Wijman, 2020)

Everyone’s Flying to the Cloud

These notable statistics clearly indicate that cloud computing is one of the most important technological innovations ever. It began by eradicating the then very costly way of purchasing a software program and then democratizing how programs by allowing anywhere, anytime access. In the coming years, cloud computing is likely to offer more cutting-edge possibilities.

We now have a new normal, thanks to the wide array of changes that COVID-19 brought with it. Whether you’re a small business owner or a large enterprise, the above challenges can be easily addressed by using the best cloud management solutions. Likewise, with the significant shift toward remote work and contactless customer transactions, it is definitely the right time for non-cloud users to start making plans to migrate to the cloud.

References:

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4. BuddeComm (2020, September 23). Germany Data Center Market – Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities 2020-2025. GlobeNewswire.
5. Check Point. (2020). 2020 Cloud Security Report. Tel-Aviv, Israel: Check Point.
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29. Wijman, T. (2020, May 8). The world’s 2.7 billion gamers will spend $159.3 billion on games in 2020; The market will surpass $200 billion by 2023. Newzoo.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.