The year of coronavirus has been a boon for major cloud providers as enterprise spending on cloud services hit $1.5 billion in the third quarter of 2020, according to a new report from Synergy Research Group.

Synergy reports that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services, which includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and and software-as-a-service (SaaS), reached $65 billion in Q3, up 28% from the third quarter of 2019. 

“In case anyone was still in doubt, cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape,” Synergy Chief Analyst John Dinsdale said. Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 10% per year to well over 40%, and Dinsdale forecasts that annual spending on cloud services to double in under four years.

The revenue jump corresponds to the pandemic-induced remote workforce that relies on cloud infrastructure to support business continuity and productivity services such as collaboration platforms, email, and mobile applications. 

Synergy notes that IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are all massive markets that are still growing rapidly, but their scale has caused growth rates to erode steadily.

However, cloud market operator and vendor revenues grew 20% for the first half of 2020, reaching $187 billion, according to a previous Synergy report. Enterprise spending on IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services in the third quarter was no exception to the spending spree as all three of these cloud services saw their growth rates bounce back about 3% “to what would have been expected under normal circumstances,” Dinsdale noted. 

Among those services, PaaS continues to have the highest growth rate of 37% in Q3, but growth is strong across a broad range of cloud segments and all geographic regions. 

“We knew there would be strong growth in Q3, but the actual growth was higher than we’d expected,” Dinsdale wrote in a prepared statement. “There is no doubt that COVID-19 was the main reason for that boost.

“Workloads are being shifted to public clouds even more quickly than anticipated and hosted software apps are especially attractive for enterprises navigating their way through a worldwide pandemic,” Dinsdale added. “Rapid adoption is also being helped by a plethora of hybrid cloud services which are helping to smooth the path towards greater usage of public clouds. Whatever a post-pandemic world may look like, we don’t expect those trends to reverse.”