Gartner Inc. reckons the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17 percent this year.

The research firm said in its latest report that the market for cloud services, worth $178 billion in 2015, will surge to $208.6 billion by the end of this year, which puts it higher than the gross domestic product (GDP) of Portugal.

Gartner says much of this growth will be driven by the cloud system infrastructure services segment, which it says will expand by 42.8 percent this year. The cloud application services segment will also grow substantially, by 21.7 percent to $38.9 billion by the end of the year.

“Growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey,” Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.

Still, the public cloud remains a long way from fulfilling its potential, Nag said. He points out that there’s a huge appetite for cloud services, but many organizations are refraining from using them due to issues they have around privacy and security.

“Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organizations still have no current plans to use cloud services,” Nag said.

But Gartner reckons that many organizations are likely being overly paranoid about the risks of using public cloud services from the major vendors. In its report, it points out that vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have a strong track record of providing good security and transparency.

“Gartner’s position on cloud security has been clear — public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner.”

Gartner was just as bullish about the prospects of private cloud services in a second report, saying that these will see significant growth through 2017 at the very least. The current trend is for enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud models, with some of their more sensitive workloads kept on-premises and the rest being shunted to the cloud.

Still, hybrid cloud faces its own challengers, with Gartner reporting that organizations are worried about issues such as application incompatibilities, integration, a lack of management tools, common APIs and vendor support.

“Of course in the case of hybrid cloud, these top concerns also highlight some of the top opportunities for providers,” Anderson said. “We know that public cloud services will continue to grow. We also know that private cloud services (of various types) will become more widely used. Therefore, providers must focus on the top hybrid cloud challenges to be successful in meeting the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions.”

Photo Credit: giri_trisanto via Compfight cc