A new report has predicted strong growth in cloud services in the next three years.
Cloud services are some of the most popular and fastest growing in the whole of the IT sector and new research suggests that the current rate of expansion is showing no sign of slowing up.
A report from Gartner found that the Middle Eastern and Northern African public cloud services market will be the next region to enjoy the benefits that the systems bring, as it is set for strong growth in 2013.
The research company found that revenue is forecast to reach $462.3 million by the end of 2013, which is a huge 24.5 per cent increase from that observed in 2012.
Globally, the latest figures are expected to show that the market is currently worth $110 billion.
Gartner found that business process services – also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS – is the largest segment in the cloud services market. Its figures suggest that BpaaS accounts for around 38 per cent of the total Middle East and Northern Africa market.
However, it is being caught up by a number of dynamic services, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) all exhibiting strong numbers and high in the cloud service market and this is expected to continue through 2016.
Furthermore, security services and cloud management will also display strong growth over the next three years.
Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, said: "Cloud services spending continues to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace.
"Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher, around 20.2 per cent. Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive."
Cloud advertising, which is fed by strong performance from web giant Google, will continue as the single largest source of spending within the cloud services marketplace throughout the short to medium term.