• Enterprise spending on cloud computing is growing at a faster rate than overall IT spending, Gartner cloud forecaster Ed Anderson believes. Cloud computing is forecast to grow 19% in 2012, becoming a $109 billion (€88 billion) industry, up from $91 billion (€74 billion) last year.
   
  In the next four years, it is expected to nearly double to $207 billion (€168 billion), according to Anderson's latest findings. That compares to the 3% growth expected in the overall global IT market.
   
  The most significant investments cloud services in the coming year will be:
   
   - Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is expected to grow by 41%
   - Management and security is expected to rise 27.2%
   - Platform as a service rising 26.6%
   - SaaS up 17.4%
   - Business process as a service up 15%
   
  The cloud industry has a long way to go, as it only represents a 3% chunk of the overall $3.6 trillion (€2.92 trillion) spent on IT globally.

In the long term, Anderson says, the cloud model will create new IT spending opportunities. Integration, customisation, hybrid cloud and on-premise cloud installations will all grow as investment channels as cloud adoption continues.
 
"There will be some short-term decline, but in the long term, it will level out," he says.
 
Meanwhile, computing hardware sales are expected to rise only 3.4% this year to $420 billion (€343 billion), which compares to 7.4% growth in 2011.
 
Enterprise software, after increasing 9.8% in the same period, is expected to reach $281 billion (€229 billion) this year, a 4.3% rise.