The cloud infrastructure market grew by 37% from £95 billion in 2020 to £131 billion in 2021, according to Synergy Research data.
Focusing in on the final quarter, enterprise spending clocked out at £37 billion, marking a similar 36% increase over the previous year.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continued to grow at astonishing rates considering the maturity of the market at this point.
John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, said: “It is a strong testimony to the value and attractiveness of cloud services that the 2021 market growth rate actually exceeded 2020 growth, despite the enormous scale that has already been achieved. Enterprises are now spending twice as much on cloud services as they spend on their own data centres.”
The leader of the big three, Amazon Web Services, is still growing faster than the market at 39% for the quarter, although its market share has remained persistent at 33% for some years now.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google both saw an exceptional quarter with similar growth rates of 45%. However, of the two, Microsoft has distinguished itself as accelerating at a far greater rate.
The company has charted a journey from 12% to 22% of market share in just four years, taking mostly from other smaller providers.
Google, whilst still growing from 6% to 10% in the same time period, has failed to have the same market impact.
Dinsdale continued: “The battle for market share is getting more interesting. Amazon continues to lead by a wide margin, but Microsoft, Google and Alibaba all continue to grow more rapidly. Microsoft’s market share is making impressive gains and is now just eleven percentage points behind Amazon. The rising tide continues to lift all boats, but some are being lifted more swiftly than others.”
In the public cloud sector, the big three’s dominance is even more apparent with their control of 71% of the market.
Synergy Research does not include software as a service (SaaS) revenue in its data.
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