Cloud Computing Statistics That Actually Tell You Where the Market Stands in 2025

These cloud computing statistics cover market size, adoption, spending, waste, vendor share, security, and industry use all sourced from analyst reports and primary research published between 2023 and 2025.

Cloud Computing Statistics: Global Market Size and Growth in 2025

The cloud market is large. How large exactly depends on which segment you count, but by any measure, the numbers are significant.The overall global cloud computing market reached $912.77 billion in 2025, according to Precedence Research.

That compares to $156.4 billion in 2020 growth of roughly 5.8x in five years. Forecasts from the same source put the market crossing $1 trillion before 2028, with projections extending to $1.614 trillion by 2030.The public cloud alone is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2026, driven largely by AI infrastructure investment and hybrid cloud expansion.

Regionally, North America leads with $248.07 billion in public cloud revenue in 2024, with the United States accounting for $183.57 billion of that. The Asia-Pacific region is growing rapidly  China alone is projected to reach $121 billion in public cloud revenue by 2027.

Western Europe and North America combined still account for roughly 82% of total global cloud spending, though that share is gradually narrowing as adoption accelerates in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. About 40% of organisations in developing regions are currently planning or evaluating cloud strategies, according to Oracle and IDC research.

Segment Breakdown: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS in 2025

Segment	2024 Market Size	2025 Projection	Fastest Growing?
SaaS (Software as a Service)	$251 billion	$390.5 billion	No
PaaS (Platform as a Service)	$172 billion	$208.64 billion	No
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)	$180 billion	Expanding	Yes — 26.2% CAGR

SaaS remains the largest segment by revenue. IaaS is growing fastest, fuelled by AI workloads, big data infrastructure, and remote operations. PaaS sits in the middle steadily growing but less headline-grabbing than the other two.

What's often overlooked is that these three segments don't operate independently. Many organisations use all three simultaneously, which makes spending attribution across segments genuinely complicated in practice.

Cloud Adoption Statistics: How Many Organisations Actually Use It?

The short answer is: most of them.94% of enterprises report using cloud services in some form, according to RightScale and Zippia. Among organisations with more than 1,000 employees, this figure has held consistently above 90% for several years running.

60% of organisations are running more than half of their workloads in the cloud, up from 39% in 2022, according to Fortinet. That shift in just three years reflects how quickly cloud has moved from supplementary to primary infrastructure.

SMB adoption is lower but catching up. About 44% of small businesses use cloud infrastructure or hosting services, compared to 74% of large enterprises. The public cloud is expected to host 63% of SMB workloads within the next year, per RightScale projections.

In terms of strategy:

• 47% of organisations are pursuing a cloud-first strategy
• 30% describe themselves as already cloud-native
• 37% intend to become cloud-native within three years

What About Cloud Repatriation?

This one surprises people. Only 5% of organisations say they plan to move back to on-premises infrastructure.

Repatriation gets significant media coverage relative to how rarely it actually happens. In practice, most organisations that move specific workloads back on-premises do so selectively for compliance, cost, or latency reasons rather than abandoning cloud wholesale.

Cloud Spending Statistics: What Organisations Are Actually Paying

Global public cloud spending is projected to reach $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024 a year-over-year increase of roughly 21%, according to Gartner. That growth is primarily driven by AI infrastructure, generative AI services, and hybrid cloud expansion.

33% of organisations are now spending more than $12 million annually on public cloud services, up from 29% in 2024. 72% of businesses spend over $1.2 million per year.SMBs are not sitting this out.

More than 54% of small and medium businesses spend over $1.2 million annually on cloud up from 38% two years ago, per RightScale. By 2025, SMBs are expected to direct more than 50% of their total technology budget to cloud services.

How IT Budget Allocation Is Shifting

Spending Type	2022 Share	2025 Projection
Traditional IT (on-premises)	58.7%	Declining
Cloud-based IT	41.3%	Becoming majority
Application software in cloud	57.7%	65.9%

Traditional IT spending is on a consistent downward trajectory. Morgan Stanley projected that only 32% of enterprise applications would run on traditional servers by 2022, down from 50% in 2019. That erosion has continued.

Are Cloud Costs Coming In Where Expected?

Not for most companies. 6 in 10 organisations report that their cloud costs are higher than anticipated, according to CloudZero's 2024 State of Cloud Cost Intelligence Report. Only 30% of organisations can accurately attribute their cloud costs to specific teams, products, or processes.

That visibility gap is not a minor administrative inconvenience. Teams commonly report that without knowing what is driving costs, they cannot make rational decisions about where to cut or where to invest more.

Cloud Waste Statistics: Where the Budget Actually Goes

Cloud waste is one of the more striking findings across industry surveys and one of the most consistent.32% of cloud budgets are wasted on average, according to Flexera. The primary causes are overprovisioned resources, idle infrastructure, and services that were provisioned but never meaningfully used.

At a market scale of $723 billion, 32% waste represents roughly $230 billion in annual spending that generates no measurable return.75% of organisations report that cloud waste increased alongside their cloud spend, according to StormForge.

Some respondents reported waste as high as 47% of their total cloud budget.42% of CIOs and CTOs cite cloud waste as their biggest operational challenge in 2025, per Zesty research.

The Visibility Problem

The root cause in most cases is not reckless spending it is a lack of visibility. In 54% of cases, cloud waste is directly attributed to insufficient insight into where costs are going, according to Anodot. 78% of organisations detect cloud cost anomalies too late to prevent overspend either hours, days, or even weeks after they occur.

Compounding this, 80% of organisations report widening visibility gaps across their cloud infrastructure, according to Nasuni. Shared costs, untagged resources, and multi-tenant architectures all make clean attribution harder.

ROI and Payback Period

53% of enterprises had not yet seen substantial value from cloud investment at the time of PwC's researcha finding that frustrates many finance leaders who moved to cloud specifically for cost savings.

McKinsey's research suggests the typical payback window is 1 to 3 years, provided organisations follow cost management best practices consistently.In practice, organisations that realise ROI earliest tend to have clear cost attribution, dedicated FinOps functions, and defined unit economics cost per customer, cost per product feature rather than relying on aggregate cloud bills alone.

Cloud Cost Optimisation Statistics

Given how much is being wasted, it is not surprising that cost optimisation has become a dominant IT priority.67% of CIOs say cloud cost optimisation is a top IT priority in 2025, according to Splunk and BCG research up eight percentage points from 2024.

78% of organisations are actively working to reduce cloud waste, improve cost visibility, or shift more workloads to cost-efficient SaaS models, per Flexera.95% of organisations automate some CloudOps tasks. However, only 15% report doing so extensively.

The gap between basic automation and mature automation is wide, and teams commonly report that extending automation beyond simple scheduling is harder than it sounds.39% of organisations now use unit economics metrics like cost per customer or cost per feature to manage cloud expenses meaningfully.

This approach is growing, though it still represents a minority of how cloud costs are tracked.

59% of IT professionals use three or more separate tools to manage their cloud environments. Managing multiple toolsets creates its own overhead and reduces the quality of insight any single view can provide.

Cloud Vendor Market Share Statistics

Three providers dominate the public cloud market. That has been true for several years and shows no sign of changing materially.

Provider	2024 Market Share	Key Strength	2024 Revenue
AWS (Amazon)	31–32%	IaaS, breadth of services	~$100 billion
Microsoft Azure	20–23%	Enterprise, PaaS, hybrid	—
Google Cloud	11–13%	AI/ML, analytics, developer tools	—
Alibaba Cloud	~4–5%	Asia-Pacific IaaS	—

Together, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud account for 66–71% of the global public cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group and Reuters.AWS leads in IaaS globally. Azure leads in private and hybrid cloud deployments for enterprises, with Azure Stack remaining the most widely used private cloud platform.

Google Cloud's IaaS growth reached an 11% global share in 2024, driven by AI workloads and developer-focused tooling.Alibaba dominates IaaS across the Asia-Pacific region, holding the third-largest position globally in that segment despite lower overall market share numbers.

At the data platform level, Databricks reached a $62 billion valuation after a $10 billion raise in early 2025. Salesforce holds a $231.4 billion market cap, making it the largest dedicated SaaS company by valuation. Snowflake's market cap stood at approximately $43.6 billion as of April 2025.

Cloud Deployment Model Statistics: Public, Private, Hybrid, and Multicloud

Most organisations are not using a single cloud. That is the clearest takeaway from deployment model data.

• 67% use a public cloud
• 45% maintain a private cloud
• 55% still rely on some on-premises infrastructure
• 39% have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy (up from 36% the prior year)
• 33% use a multicloud approach

The typical organisation tests or deploys across 3.4 public clouds and 3.9 private clouds, according to Flexera. 86% have at least 11 SaaS providers, and a third have more than 50.

80% of organisations use multiple public cloud providers simultaneously, per Virtana. Only 8% of organisations rely on a single public IaaS provider, according to Cisco.

Why Hybrid and Multicloud?

The motivations vary more than vendor marketing suggests:

• 59% of technology leaders choose hybrid or multicloud for security reasons specifically, they do not want to depend on one vendor's security posture
• 56% want access to capabilities unique to specific providers
• 39.5% cite cost efficiency as a driver

Managing multiple environments creates its own costs. 86% of enterprises report experiencing challenges managing data across multicloud environments, according to Statista-cited research.

Cloud Security Statistics

Security is the concern that appears most consistently across every cloud survey, regardless of organisation size or industry.95% of companies express moderate to extreme concern about cloud security, according to Fortinet. That concern is not unfounded.

The average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, per IBM. Healthcare is the hardest-hit sector, with average breach costs exceeding $10.9 million.

Data breaches increased by 6% in 2024, exposing over 16.8 billion records, according to Flashpoint.Ransomware accounts for 24% of all cyberattacks in 2025, with phishing often impersonating major brands remaining the most common entry point.

Most Common Cloud Security Threats

Threat	Share of Cloud Security Issues
Misconfiguration	62–68%
Insecure interfaces	52%
Unauthorised access	58%
Account hijacking	50%

Misconfiguration is the leading cause of cloud security incidents by a wide margin. At first glance this seems surprising most organisations have dedicated security teams. But in practice, the speed of cloud provisioning and the complexity of multi-environment deployments create conditions where configuration errors are common and often go undetected for extended periods.

73% of organisations say cloud technology has added complexity to their operations. 70% of CIOs report feeling less in control because of cloud infrastructure, according to Fujitsu research.

IT downtime now costs an average of $14,056 per minute, rising to $23,750 per minute for large enterprises. A single hour of downtime costs enterprises over $100,000 in direct losses alone, according to Accenture and that figure excludes legal costs, SLA penalties, and reputational damage.

Cloud Statistics by Industry

Cloud adoption is not uniform across sectors. Some industries are well ahead, others are still in earlier stages.

Retail and e-commerce rank as the most proactive cloud users, followed by finance and banking, and software/technology companies. Government (16%) and electronics and hardware (25%) reported the lowest cloud service usage in recent O'Reilly survey data.

Industry	Key Cloud Usage Metric
Insurance	81% use cloud for claims management
Healthcare	23.2% of sensitive data stored in cloud
Commercial Real Estate	30% plan cloud investment
Retail / E-commerce	Most proactive cloud user by survey
Education	63% plan cloud-based curriculum management

Healthcare organisations are storing a significant share of sensitive patient data in cloud environments which makes security and compliance both a technical and regulatory concern simultaneously.

Cloud Storage and Data Statistics

Data generation is the engine underneath cloud growth. The numbers are genuinely difficult to contextualise.The world generates approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.

Total global data is projected to reach 200 zettabytes by 2025, with 50% of that stored in cloud environments, according to Forbes.47% of all corporate cloud data is classified as sensitive, according to Thales Group.

The breakdown of sensitive data stored in the cloud looks like this:

• Financial and business records: 53%
• Employee records: 48%
• Customer data: 44%
• Health records: 23.2%

Among European companies, 46% store all of their data in the cloud, though only 54% of that sensitive data is encrypted, per Thales Europe research. That gap between data-in-cloud and encryption coverage is a meaningful compliance risk in regulated markets.

Cisco estimates there will be more than 75 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2025, each generating data that feeds back into cloud infrastructure. Amazon S3 leads enterprise cloud storage with a 24% market share.

Emerging Trends: Edge Computing, Serverless, and Green Cloud

These are not fringe topics anymore. They are growing segments with real budget allocations.

Edge computing spend is projected to reach $261 billion in 2025, driven by real-time data processing needs and IoT expansion. IDC expects that figure to grow to $378 billion by 2028, with energy, industrial, and transportation sectors leading adoption.

Serverless computing has crossed the 75% adoption mark in 2025, according to Datadog and AWS Heroes data. Over 70% of AWS users now use Lambda. Azure's serverless usage jumped 76% in a single year, driven by container-based deployment platforms.

Environmental impact is an increasingly visible part of the cloud conversation. Moving workloads from on-premises infrastructure to IaaS reduces carbon emissions by up to 84% and energy consumption by up to 64%, according to Accenture.

Data centres currently consume between 1% and 1.5% of global electricity output, and a single hyperscale data centre can use as much energy as 80,000 households. By 2025, IT broadly could account for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions if current trends continue without efficiency intervention.

Summary: Key Cloud Computing Statistics at a Glance

Statistic	Figure	Source
Global cloud market size (2025)	$912.77 billion	Precedence Research
Global public cloud spending (2025)	$723.4 billion	Gartner
Enterprise cloud adoption rate	94%	RightScale / Zippia
Average cloud budget wasted	32%	Flexera
AWS public cloud market share	31–32%	Synergy Research
Average data breach cost (2024)	$4.88 million	IBM
Organisations not seeing cloud ROI	53%	PwC
Organisations detecting cost anomalies late	78%	CloudZero
Global data in cloud by 2025	50% of 200 ZB	Forbes
Edge computing spend (2025)	$261 billion	IDC

Conclusion

Cloud adoption is broad, spending is rising, and waste remains a stubborn problem. The data consistently points to visibility knowing what you are spending and what is the difference between cloud being a cost driver and a genuine business tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of companies use cloud computing?

Around 94% of enterprises use cloud in some form. Among smaller businesses, the rate is lower approximately 44%  though it is rising steadily as cloud pricing and accessibility improve.

Which cloud provider has the largest market share?

AWS holds 31–32% of the global public cloud market. Azure follows at 20–23%, and Google Cloud at 11–13%. Together they control roughly two-thirds of public cloud infrastructure globally.

How much cloud spend is typically wasted?

Industry surveys consistently put cloud waste at around 32% of total cloud budgets. Overprovisioning and idle resources are the primary causes, compounded by limited visibility into where costs originate.

What is the biggest challenge organisations face with cloud adoption?

Managing cloud costs is the most cited challenge, ahead of security. Poor visibility into spending, complex pricing models, and difficulty attributing costs to teams or products all contribute.

Is cloud computing still growing in 2025?

Yes. The market reached $912.77 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $1 trillion before 2028. AI infrastructure demand, hybrid cloud adoption, and IaaS expansion are the primary growth drivers.