Apr 21, 2021 Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23,1% in 2021 to total $332,3-billion, up from $270-billion in 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. “The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud,” says Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner. “Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centres. “Emerging technologies such as containerisation, virtualisation and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud.”