Dive Brief:

• The cloud market, sustaining its momentum, is projected to reach $474 billion in global revenue next year, up 16% from 2021, Gartner projected Wednesday.
• The growth shows no signs of slowing. Public cloud services end user spending is projected to surpass $716 billion by 2024, from $403.8 billion this year, according to Gartner. 
• One major threat to enterprise leaders lies in cloud overspend. SaaS is projected to reach $173.9 billion in end-user spending next year, but Gartner research shows 25% of SaaS is underutilized or over deployed. "That's a huge amount of money," said Milind Govekar, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

Insight: 

The market has room to grow because so many systems still remain outside of the cloud. While 90% of companies report using the technology, the majority of core applications are not cloud based.

Most organizations are still treating cloud as a technology disruptor or a capability enabler, according to Govekar. But few organizations are using it to innovate or disrupt other businesses. 

While cloud can optimize existing processes and modernize internal systems, it can also serve as a way of launching completely new business models, becoming a disruption channel, Govekar said. 

For example, one large Europe-based shipping company launched a business-to-business insurance product, an effort made possible by the cloud's support of multiple data streams and the application of algorithms.

Gartner projects growth across the six primary cloud categories, according to the public cloud services end-user spending forecast. 

Infrastructure and platform as a service end-user spending are projected to have the largest growth from 2021 to 2022, up 32% and 28%, respectively. Software spending is expected to have large growth too, up almost 18% next year. 

New projects going to the cloud, migrations from existing data centers and refactoring or rewriting applications help drive revenue growth, Govekar said. 

As companies mature their infrastructure stack, they are also investing in supporting technology. Forrester found cloud-native adoption rose this year, and next year the analyst firm projects half of enterprise organizations will adopt containers. This will coincide with more enterprises refactoring or replatforming their cloud strategies, rather than following existing plans. 

Lift-and-shift was generally available, but now it has run its course, according to Lee Sustar, principal analyst at Forrester. There are more net-new cloud deployments, which supports cloud-native technology adoption too. 

Forrester projects the cloud-native technology adoption will happen across major technology domains, from big data to IoT.