Accelerated adoption of cloud due to COVID-19 will lift cloud professional services and hosted private cloud markets

COVID-19 impacts and assumptions

COVID-19 has undoubtedly created financial pain for businesses across all verticals. Business operations have been disrupted and revenue streams have declined in many industries across the globe. At the same time, the pandemic has required additional investment to support remote work and adjust business processes to align with public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including social distancing. However, even amid these financial challenges, businesses have spent and plan to continue spending more of their IT resources on cloud-delivered services. Cloud’s benefits of agility, innovation and a high degree of automation have been reinforced during the pandemic and have prepared adopters for the next unknown disruption to their business.

Given these circumstances, TBR’s market forecasts for cloud professional services and hosted private cloud have been adjusted to reflect the impact of COVID-19 over the five-year forecast period. In the next two years, we anticipate growth will slow slightly due to the impacts social restrictions are having on supply and demand. Particularly given the uncertain environment, business spending will likely take longer to rebound than in previous economic downturns. This holds true across IT departments, as many businesses that have on-premises IT infrastructures will postpone cloud deployments until after the pandemic abates.

As such, workload activity including legacy SAP, VMware and Oracle migrations to bare metal IaaS and the associated services opportunity will be affected. While these impacts will reduce market growth by a few percentage points through the remainder of 2020 and into early 2021, the flexible nature of cloud-based transactions make the cloud professional services and hosted private cloud markets less susceptible to the virus’s near-term effects than other markets within the IT industry. COVID-19 is testing many companies’ IT preparedness, and as a result, a notable increase in cloud usage will occur once the virus subsidies and IT spending returns to normal, driving accelerated growth from 2022 to 2024.

TBR’s Cloud Professional Services Market Forecast and Hosted Private Cloud Market Forecast provide insights into how market sizes, growth and vendor positions will change over the next five years. Each forecast is broken down into four subsegments and both forecasts cover the Americas, EMEA and APAC.