International Data Corporation (IDC) announced the launch of the Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker. New data for the third quarter of 2014 (3Q14) shows that almost a third of combined worldwide server, disk storage, and ethernet switch infrastructure spending in the quarter came from cloud deployments. Total cloud infrastructure revenue for the quarter grew 16% year over year to $6.5 billion. Public cloud infrastructure accounted for nearly half of total cloud infrastructure revenue and is growing faster at 18% compared to one year ago.

"Public and private clouds represent the 'compute factories' and 'digital content depots' of the 3rd Platform era," noted Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacenter and Cloud research at IDC. "Whether internally owned or 'rented' from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organizations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first-mover advantage to any organization in a hyper-competitive market."

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is designed to provide clients with a better understanding of what portion of the server, disk storage systems, and networking hardware markets are being deployed in cloud environments. This tracker will break out vendors' revenue by the hardware technology market into public and private cloud environments for historical data and also provide a five-year forecast by the technology market.