Western European private clouds to hit $7.9bn in four years

Nearly 25% annual growth predicted but with hosted cloud take up expected to surgeThe Western European private cloud market will to grow at a CAGR of 23.2% for the next five years to $ 7.9 billion in 2016, says a study from International Data Corporation. Cloud adoption is in the testing phase enterprises are rolling out one or a few cloud services to relevant users, but not deploying cloud on a large scale. And pre-packaged private clouds consisting of pre-configured with servers, storage, network and management are gaining interest in the market. Hosted private cloud is not nearly as popular as clouds on customers' premises, but hosted private cloud will grow even faster and revenue will exceed on-premises clouds by 2016. "The growth of private cloud is even more impressive in the context of the parlous economic situation," said Mette Ahorlu, research director, IDC European Services. "It's driven by the need for cost savings and efficiency and with a longer perspective of creating increased flexibility, and is across the board — from hardware, to software, to management, networking and services. Creating a private cloud has an impact on all aspects of IT infrastructure." Security, compliance and data location remain barriers to public cloud but could become drivers for the adoption of the private cloud. While the market is serviced by traditional IT providers and outsourcing companies, telecom providers have also seen it as a great opportunity to expand their businesses: cloud is fundamentally a network-based offering, it commoditizes well and scales to a mass market customer base, and builds on the kind of support and billing relationships that telcos are used to.