Cloud computing will account for more than $1.3 trillion worth of information technology spending by 2022, according to a new report from Gartner Inc.

The analyst firm, in its “Market Insight: Cloud Shift — 2018 to 2022” report published today, said that across key areas of IT spending, including application software, business process outsourcing and system infrastructure and software, about 19 percent of spending currently goes to the cloud.

But that figure will rise to 28 percent by 2022, as growth in enterprise spending on cloud services continues to outstrip that of traditional on-premises IT hardware and software.

“The shift of enterprise IT spending to new, cloud-based alternatives is relentless, although it’s occurring over the course of many years due to the nature of traditional enterprise IT,” Michael Warrilow, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement.

The main reasons for this shift are that companies see benefits such as pay-as-you-go pricing and on-demand capacity as providing superior agility and flexibility compared with traditional IT infrastructure, Warrilow said.

Still, Gartner conceded that cloud computing isn’t always the answer to most enterprise needs. In fact, many companies still have enormous existing IT infrastructure in which they’ve made significant investments, and they’re going to be reluctant to discard them. Another factor is that cloud computing can often work out to be more expensive than buying on-premises infrastructure, and some companies may have concerns about allowing a cloud provider to store their most mission-critical data.

For all those reasons, traditional IT spending will still account for 72 percent of revenue in IT markets by 2022, Gartner said.

The tide is turning, however, and right now application software spending is seeing the biggest shift, with more than a third having already gone to the cloud.  Customer relationship management software such as that sold by Salesforce.com Inc. is the main driver of this trend, and it has already reached a “tipping point” where a higher proportion of spend occurs in the cloud rather than on on-premises software. According to Gartner’s forecast, applications including content and collaboration services and office suites will also reach the same tipping point by 2022.

The fastest shift will be seen in spending on system infrastructure, Gartner said. To date it has been the slowest segment of IT spending to move to the cloud because of enterprises’ existing investments in data center gear, IT services and virtualization and operating system software, but that will change as the time comes for that infrastructure to be renewed.

“As cloud becomes increasingly mainstream, it will influence even greater portions of enterprise IT decisions, particularly in system infrastructure as increasing tension becomes apparent between on- and off-premises solutions,” Warrilow said.

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