New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the global cloud computing market grew by 24 percent over the last year, valuing it at more than $180 billion.

Synergy’s figure is based on the revenues it calculated from six segments of cloud services in tracks: infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, hosted private cloud, enterprise software-as-a-service, unified communications-as-a-service and public and private cloud hardware and software.

According to Synergy’s figures, IaaS and PaaS saw their combined revenues jump by 47 percent in 2017, with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. leading the field.

Enterprise SaaS, a category dominated by Microsoft and Salesforce.com Inc., also saw rapid growth, with revenues up by 31 percent year-on-year.

Synergy said last year was also notable because spending on cloud services finally overtook spending on the hardware and software infrastructure companies use to build public and private clouds. Even so, cloud infrastructure providers still shelled out a massive $80 billion on hardware and software over the last year, with those investments helping them to drive more than $100 billion in revenues for IaaS and enterprise SaaS.

Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell EMC, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies Inc., were the leaders in public cloud infrastructure sales, while Dell EMC and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. led the way in private cloud infrastructure.

According to John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst and research director, the massive amounts of cash being spent on cloud computing shows that there are few, if any barriers to adoption remaining. As such, he expects all six cloud market segments to continue growing for the foreseeable future.

“Previously perceived weaknesses such as security [are] now often seen as strengths,” Dinsdale said in a statement. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years.”

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