Dive Brief:

• Spending on IT infrastructure products — server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches — needed to deploy cloud environments will increase 12.4% in 2017 to $40.1 billion, according to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC).

• Public cloud data centers will account for just over 60% of that spending and will grow at the fastest rate year over year. Off-premise private cloud environments will represent 14.9% of overall spending and will grow 11.9% year over year, according to IDC.

• Ethernet switches will be the fastest growing technology segment, with 25.8% growth in 2017. Spending on servers and enterprise storage will grow 9.1% and 12.0%, respectively, IDC predicts.

Dive Insight:

It’s no surprise that as the popularity of cloud grows, spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow as well, while spending on on-premises environments will decline.

Companies are spending less on their own hardware and more on services that enable them to move workloads to the cloud, allowing them to focus on critical business objectives instead. Cloud infrastructure is growing much faster than traditional IT infrastructure, which dropped 4.6% in 2017, accounting for 58.7% of the overall end-user spending on IT infrastructure products.

Despite the rise of cloud and virtualization technologies, many companies still rely on their old mainframe computers to get things done, according to Syncsort’s annual State of the Mainframe survey released in April.

That might explain why IDC found more than half of IT spending still goes to traditional IT infrastructure. The mainframe remains the corporate workhorse and the most popular tool for performing large-scale transaction processing on mission-critical applications, Syncsort’s survey found.