Spending on public cloud services in Australia is expected to increase by 18.4 percent over 2020 to reach $10.6 billion, according to a new report from Gartner. This is slightly lower than the expected global growth rate of 23.1 percent, rising to US$332.3 (~AU$428 billion) billion from US$270 billion (~AU$332 billion). “Organisations in Australia and New Zealand responded to COVID-19 by accelerating their adoption of cloud. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud. It allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud,” said Gartner research vice president Michael Warrilow.