Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has urged cloud providers to build holistic big data offerings if they want to maximise their market share, with worldwide investment in cloud storage infrastructure set to be worth $22.6bn (£14.5bn) per year by 2015.

IDC says demand for cloud computing will ‘drive IT spending over the next five years’. It says public cloud service providers will look to expand their infrastructure at a rate of 23.6 per cent year-on-year (compound growth) while enterprises will grow their combined private cloud infrastructure by 28.9 per cent each year over the same period.

Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems & executive strategies at IDC, said that even while economic conditions remain tough, cloud builders will be “among the most expansive spenders on IT products and services.”

The IDC assessment found that the increase in public clouds being used as information ‘depots’ and a large uptake of software and application ‘as a service’ offerings are driving the market, while it also noted that many private clouds – such as those used for governments – are ‘comparable in scope’ to some of the public setups.

The organisation listed the five main information requirements which are fuelling the increase in storage demands:
•    Enabling more efficient delivery of information/applications to Internet-based customers
•    Reducing upfront infrastructure investment by cutting the cost and time of deploying new IT infrastructure
•    Minimising the need for internal IT infrastructure for unpredictable workloads (with the cloud’s scalability)
•    Lowering and spreading the ongoing costs of long-term archiving of information
•    Enabling near-continuous, real-time analysis of large volumes and wide varieties of customer-, partner-, and machine-generated data (big data).

"The challenge facing the storage industry will be to balance public cloud service providers' demand for low-cost storage while boosting demand for advanced software solutions in areas such as object-based storage, automated data tiering, big data processing, and advanced archiving services," said Villars.

"Big data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. Providing a strong portfolio of complete Big Data solutions – hardware, software, and implementation services – will be a high priority to succeed. Similarly, a strong portfolio of active archival storage solutions will be a critical differentiator for private content or archive cloud deployments."