International Data Corporation (IDC’s) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, shows that vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products such as (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew 27.3% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), reaching $12.8 billion.

For the full year 2017, the combined public and private cloud deployments continued the double-digit annual growth trend from past years with revenues reaching $43.4 billion for 21.7% year-over-year growth.

Public cloud infrastructure revenue has almost doubled in the past two years to $8.5 billion, growing 34.0% year over year in 4Q17.

Private cloud revenue reached $4.3 billion for an annual increase of 15.7%. Total worldwide cloud IT infrastructure revenue in 2017 more than doubled when compared to 2013.

The combined public and private cloud revenues now represent 42.2% of the total worldwide IT infrastructure spending, up from 39.3% a year ago.

Traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure revenue grew 12.8% from a year ago, although it has been generally declining over the past several years; at $17.5 billion in 4Q17 it still represents 57.8% of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending.

Kuba Stolarski, research director for Computing Platforms at IDC, said “2017 finished strong for public cloud IT infrastructure growth, led by continued expansion by Amazon and renewed growth in Google and Facebook infrastructure,”

“While there has been high growth in all IT infrastructure segments lately, public cloud, led by the hyperscalers, has resulted in the largest share of infrastructure growth, which is expected to continue at this pace for at least a few more quarters.”

Except for Latin America and Japan revenue, which grew 6.2% and 4.8% respectively from a year ago, all other regions in the world grew their cloud IT Infrastructure revenue by double digits.

Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) saw the fastest growth rates at 59.0% and 34.1%, respectively.

Canada (23.3%), Middle East & Africa (MEA) (27.5%) and USA (21.1%) had annual growth in the twenties, while Western Europe (16.6%) had annual growth in the teens.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is designed to provide clients with a better understanding of what portion of the server, disk storage systems, and networking hardware markets are being deployed in cloud environments.

This tracker breaks out each vendors’ revenue by the hardware technology market into public and private cloud environments for historical data and provides a five-year forecast by the technology market.

IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service.

Public cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.

The public cloud market includes variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters.

It also includes content services delivered by a group of suppliers IDC calls Value Added Content Providers (VACP).

Private cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff.

In private cloud that is managed by in-house staff, “vendors (cloud service providers)” are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups.

In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the “service users.”

IDC defines Compute Platforms as compute intensive servers. Storage Platforms includes storage intensive servers as well as external storage and storage expansion (JBOD) systems.

Storage intensive servers are defined based on high storage media density. Servers with low storage density are defined as compute intensive systems.

Storage Platforms does not include internal storage media from compute intensive servers.

There is no overlap in revenue between Compute Platforms and Storage Platforms, in contrast with IDC’s Server Tracker and Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, which include overlaps in portions of revenue associated with server-based storage.