International Data Corp. (IDC) has gone out on a limb with the prediction that cloud IT infrastructure will account for a third of all enterprise IT infrastructure spending this year.

IDC’s latest survey estimates that total worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure – which includes servers, storage and Ethernet switches – will top $32.6 billion for the year, a 24 percent increase on last year’s total.

The public cloud is driving much of this growth, with spending set to increase by 29.6 percent compared to one year ago. Private cloud spending meanwhile, will rise by 15.8 percent.

The bad news for legacy tech vendors is that all of this cloudy growth will come at the expense of spending on traditional on-premise IT infrastructure. Non-cloud environment spending will plunge by 1.6 percent in 2015, but will still account for the lion’s share of the overall market at $66.8 billion, IDC said.

“Numerous IDC surveys indicate growing interest among enterprise customers to cloud deployments across multiple IT domains,” said Natalya Yezhkova, research director of storage systems at IDC. “End-users often cite the agility of IT infrastructure and economic reasons as drivers for cloud adoption, but we also expect that the proliferation of next generation applications born and run in the cloud will fuel its further growth.”

Looking further ahead, IDC forecasts that cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1 percent, hitting $53.1 billion by 2019, giving it a 46 percent share of the market overall. Public cloud spending will account for most of that, growing at 16.3 percent CAGR to $33.6 billion, while private cloud will grow 13.2 percent CAGR to $19.4 billion in 2019. Non-cloud IT infrastructure spending will continue its downward spiral, dropping by 1.7 percent CAGR over the same period.

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