The global public cloud services market will be worth $204 billion (£140bn) this year, up by more than 16 percent from 2015’s total of $175 billion (£123bn).

This is according to research firm Gartner, which predicts the highest growth in 2016 will come from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)  offerings; set to grow 38.4 percent.

Shift

“The market for public cloud services is continuing to demonstrate high rates of growth across all markets and Gartner expects this to continue through 2017,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

“This strong growth continues reflect a shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, due to increased trend of organisations pursuing a digital business strategy.”

Gartner’s predictions come as Synergy Research Group claimed that 2015 was a year where the growth rate for public Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS/PaaS) services hit 51 percent, outgrowing the private and hybrid cloud segment.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke earlier in January.

Within the cloud services market, Gartner said that IaaS will remain the fastest-growing segment in 2016, predicted to reach $22.4 billion (£15.7bn).

“IaaS continues to be the strongest-growing segment as enterprises move away from data center build-outs and move their infrastructure needs to the public cloud,” said Nag. “Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success.”