Australia’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market continues to grow strongly with cloud driving digital transformation and new product development, according to new research from Australian analyst firm Telsyte.

Aussie organisations spent $1.36 billion on IaaS in 2020, up 38% from the $988 million spent in 2019 and is on track to exceed $3 billion by 2025.

Analysts said the IaaS market benefited from the pandemic-driven digital transformation rush and 1 in 3 (33%) Australian business leaders said COVID-19 is a driver for digital transformation strategies, and almost half now have a ‘cloud first’ policy.

Telsyte forecasts the total market to reach $1.74 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 28% as half (51%) of businesses that have adopted cloud are planning to increase their cloud spending in 2021.

The Telsyte Australian Hyperscale Cloud Market Study 2021 found the big six global hyperscale clouds – AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba Cloud – continued to dominate the Australian cloud market with a combined $1.16 billion in IaaS revenue in 2020, or 85% of the market, up from 82%.

The research firm forecasts hyperscale IaaS will capture nearly 90% of revenue in Australia by 2025.

Foad Fadaghi, managing director at Telsyte, said: “The hyperscaler public clouds are consolidating their dominance in market by offering more complex services, such as machine learning, automation as well as a growing list of other services.”

Public clouds are now mainstream amongst Australian businesses. According to Telsyte’s public cloud maturity measures, 39% of organisations are in the development phase, including investigating and developing cloud services as cloud and hosted models replace on-premises applications.

With pure cloud and MSP delivery models making up 55% of application workloads, the majority of those using cloud have opted for hyperscalers’ cloud solutions, which are the most visible starting point.

Amid so many options, Telsyte’s research found businesses on average have 3.3 public cloud services and 3.8 private cloud services in use, with multi-cloud use rising with the size of organisation.

This is slightly down from four in 2020, but cloud “sprawl” is still an issue and hybrid platforms need to have consistent management across infrastructure.

Telsyte found hybrid cloud use is high (65%) as organisations shuffle a mix of workloads, and going forward, hybrid cloud use and intentions are very high (85%) as CIOs select the most appropriate hosting architecture.