Even the coronavirus crisis couldn’t curtail growth in the cloud market as operator and vendor revenues for the first half of 2020 reached $187 billion, according to a new report from Synergy Research Group.

The report found that revenue grew 20% from the first half of 2019 across four key cloud service and infrastructure market segments including data center hardware and software; enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS); cloud infrastructure services; and public cloud data center leasing and colocation construction.

“In case anyone was still in doubt, cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape,” Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale said. Cloud infrastructure services – which includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and hosted private cloud services – grew by 34% from 2019. 

And of course, the cloud’s most prominent players including Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Dell, and IBM led the show during the first half of the year. They were followed by Cisco, Google, Adobe, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur, VMware, Huawei, and SAP. According to Synergy, these companies in aggregate accounted for well over half of all cloud-related revenues.

“Amazon and Microsoft may be the poster children for this movement, but many others are benefitting, too, and most have seen relatively few negative impacts from the pandemic,” Dinsdale added.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google topped the cloud infrastructure services category while Microsoft, Salesforce, and Adobe led in enterprise SaaS. In total, cloud infrastructure services and enterprise SaaS generated almost $120 billion in revenues, according to the report. 

The revenue jump falls in accordance to the remote workforce that relies on enterprise services and cloud infrastructure to support internet services that support business continuity and productivity such as collaboration platforms, email, and mobile applications. 

And because of the influx of data pouring into data centers, cloud providers are also in need of more infrastructure housing, thereby increasing their “substantial spending” on data center leasing, colocation services, and data center construction which grew 10%. 

Synergy found that enterprise SaaS revenues grew by 21% while spending on hardware and software for public, private, and hybrid infrastructure grew by 10%, with revenue hitting just over $60 billion. The reports findings indicate that total spend was somewhat evenly split between public and private clouds.

“Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 10% per year to well over 40% and we forecast that annual spending on cloud services will double in under four years,” Dinsdale said.

As enterprises carry on in their efforts to navigate this stress test, the cloud will continue to meet this pandemic head on and provide an outlet to conserve capital and deliver on near-term demand for digital services.