End users in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are expected to increase their spending on public cloud services by 19.8% in 2024, reaching $7.3 billion from $6.1 billion in 2023. Gartner research expects this figure to rise 24.4% to $9.09 billion in 2025. All segments of the cloud market are looking at a rise in 2024. Analysts forecast that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will experience the highest end-user spending growth at 25.6%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 20.6%.
Public cloud spending will surge as companies in the MENA region move towards becoming fully digitalized corporations,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner. Additionally, Middle Eastern countries are striving for a common economic goal of becoming technology and data-centric. Organizations are using cloud technology to enable advancements in AI and business analytics.
Analysts forecast that end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 20.4% globally, reaching $675.4 billion in 2024, up from $561 billion in 2023. Generative AI (GenAI) and application modernization drive this growth. “The growth in public cloud spending is largely due to GenAI,” said Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “We expect public cloud end-user spending to surpass the one trillion dollar mark before the end of this decade.”
“IaaS continues at a robust growth rate due to the GenAI revolution,” said Nag. “The need for infrastructure to undertake AI model training, inferencing, and fine-tuning is growing exponentially and directly impacts IaaS consumption.”
While cloud infrastructure and platform services drive the highest spending growth, software-as-a-service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud market in end-user spending. Analysts project that SaaS spending will grow 20%, totaling $247.2 billion in 2024.
Nag said, “Independent software vendors modernize applications to run in a SaaS-based consumption model, driving SaaS spending.” Additionally, “Organizations are increasing their use of cloud for AI, machine learning, IoT, and big data, driving SaaS growth.”
