Spending on public cloud services in Thailand is expected to surge 17.7% to 18.3 billion baht this year, says global research firm Gartner, as companies gravitate to using cloud services to facilitate remote working amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Gartner said the fastest growing segment of the public cloud market is desktop as a service (DaaS), a cloud-based desktop virtualisation service hosted by a third party enterprise. The DaaS market is projected to rise 71.7% this year.
"DaaS offers an inexpensive option for enterprises that are supporting the surge of remote workers and their need to securely access enterprise applications from multiple devices and locations," Gartner's statement read.
According to the research firm, spending on public cloud services will rise 25.2% to 22.9 billion baht next year.
In the global level, DaaS is predicted to see the biggest growth this year, rising 95.4% to US$1.2 billion.
The world's public cloud service market is projected to grow 6.3% to $257.9 billion this year, up from $242.7 billion in 2019, Gartner indicated.
"When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, there were a few initial hiccups, but cloud ultimately delivered exactly what it was supposed to," said Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner. "It responded to increased demand and catered to customers' preference of elastic, pay-as-you-go consumption models."
Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $104.7 billion in 2020.
The research firm said there has been continued shift from on-premises license software to subscription-based SaaS models and the increased need for new software collaboration tools during the pandemic, which is propelling SaaS growth.
The second-largest market segment is cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 13.4% to $50.4 billion in 2020.
According to Gartner, cloud spending in many regions is expected to rise sharply as economies reopen and normal economic activities resumes.
"The use of public cloud services offers chief information officers (CIOs) two distinct advantages during the Covid-19 pandemic: cost scale with use and deferred spending," said Mr Nag. "CIOs can invest significantly less cash upfront by utilising cloud technology rather than scaling up on-premises data centre capacity or acquiring traditional licensed software."