SHARE By all accounts, business spending on cloud services accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Gartner Inc.’s new 2021 cloud computing forecast confirms it. The research firm said today it expects worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services to grow 23.1% in 2021, to $332.3 billion, up from the 19% growth in 2020. “The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission-critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud,” Sid Nag, a Gartner research vice president, said in a statement. Software-as-a-service remains the largest market segment at $102.8 billion in 2020, expected to grow to $122.6 billion this year. Gartner foresees the biggest gainers in 2021 to be infrastructure-as-a-service and desktop-as-a-service, at 38.5% and 67.7%, respectively.