Customer spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded US$40 billion a quarter for the first time ever in Q1 2021. At US$41.8 billion, spending grew 35% and nearly US$11 billion higher than same quarter last year.
The trend of using cloud services for data analytics and machine learning, data center consolidation, application migration, cloud native development and service delivery continued at pace. According to Canalys data, it was almost US$2 billion more than in Q4 2020.
The Canalys data said that the acceleration of digital transformation over the last 12 months, with organisations adapting to new working practices, customer engagement, and business process and supply chain dynamics, has elevated demand for cloud-based services. This, combined with the rebound in some economies, in line with government stimuli, the roll-out of mass COVID-19 vaccination programs and subsequent easing of restrictions, has increased customer confidence in committing to multi-year contracts.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the leading cloud service provider in Q1 2021, growing 32% on an annual basis and accounting for 32% of total market share.
In the last quarter, it announced new CloudFront edge locations in Croatia and Indonesia and extended its Wavelength Zones for 5G networks to Japan and across the United States. It launched its new EX2 X2gd instances based on the AWS-designed Graviton2 CPU for memory-intensive workloads and improved price-performance.
Microsoft Azure grew almost 50% for the third consecutive quarter, taking 19% market share in the latest data. Growth was boosted by longer-term customer commitments enabled by investments in Azure Arc for hybrid-IT control plane management, Azure Synapse for data analytics, and AI as a platform.
Google Cloud maintained its momentum, benefiting from its Google One approach driving cross-sell and integration opportunities across its portfolio. Overall, it grew 56% in the latest quarter to account for a 7% market share. It announced a new cloud region in Israel.
“Cloud emerged as a winner across all sectors over the last year, basically since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of lockdowns,” said Canalys Research Analyst Blake Murray. “Organisations depended on digital services and being online to maintain operations and adapt to the unfolding situation.
“Though 2020 saw large-scale cloud infrastructure spending, most enterprise workloads have not yet transitioned to the cloud. Migration and cloud spend will continue as customer confidence rises during 2021. Large projects that were postponed last year will resurface, while new use cases will expand the addressable market.”
Investment at the edge, including 5G, is a key area, especially for the development of ultra-low latency applications and use cases, such as autonomous vehicles, industrial robotics and augmented or virtual reality.
Canalys defines cloud infrastructure services as services that provide infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, either on dedicated hosted private infrastructure or shared infrastructure. This excludes software as a service expenditure directly.
