Global spending on public cloud services is forecast to hit $160 billion in 2018 at an increase of 23.2% the previous year, according to figures from IDC.
Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest cloud category with almost two thirds of all public cloud spending this year, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Of the SaaS spend, applications purchases will dominate the segment, with CRM and enterprise resource management (ERM) apps seeing the most spending.