Dive Brief:

• Cloud operator and vendor revenues grew 32% from 2017 to 2018, surpassing the $250 billion "milestone," across cloud infrastructure service, hosted private cloud, enterprise software as a service, unified communications as a service, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, according to Synergy Research.
• Infrastructure as a service and platform as a service grew more than any other segment at 50%, followed by hybrid cloud management software at 41% year-over-year. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud share about 50% of the IaaS and PaaS segment.
• Spend on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure rose above $100 billion, with public cloud spend growing "more rapidly." The enterprise SaaS segment is led by Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe.

Dive Insight:

While cloud migration can be slow and at times strenuous, enterprise adoption is almost inevitable.

In 2016, cloud services overshadowed the spend on software made to build public and private clouds for the first time, according to Synergy. That trend continued and expanded in 2017 and 2018. 

Between 10% and 20% of workloads are on the public cloud. By 2022, 28% of IT spending will go to the cloud, according to Gartner. Companies still have a long way to go toward cloud adoption, making way for a hybrid strategy. Mobile apps are the workload most commonly transitioned to a public cloud, according to a Cloud Development Survey of cloud developers.

Agility and time to value for analytical initiatives were the top cited reasons for cloud selection, as opposed to the initial reasons for cloud migration: infrastructure cost savings. Developers are "more attuned" to the scalability and "enhanced flexibility of reach" the cloud allows them, according to Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in an emailed statement to CIO Dive. 

This year companies can expect SaaS to surpass cloud just as cloud surpassed infrastructure.