The public cloud services market in the mature Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region will grow to a total of $7.4 billion in 2015, according to new research by Gartner, and is expected to eventually rise to $11.5 billion in 2018.

Notably, cloud management, cloud storage and software as a service (SaaS) will be among the faster growing public cloud services through 2018, as more enterprise and government users jump onto the cloud services bandwagon. In addition, cloud management and security services are expected to clock up to 29.9 percent growth in 2015 to reach $264.5 million. Gartner includes countries such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea in what it terms the mature APJ market,

“Many countries in the mature APJ region have solid reliable telecommunications infrastructure and relatively advanced technology usage profiles,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner in a statement. “Despite challenges in the global economy, we expect consistent and stable growth to continue through to 2018.”

Different sectors, different vectors

Gartner broke down the various cloud services into various verticals such as business process as a service (BPaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (laaS), and SaaS, among others. SaaS is expected to take the lion’s share at 21.5 percent of the overall public cloud services market in the mature APJ region, while laaS and BPaaS is expected to garner 9.8 percent and 9.2 percent of the market respectively.

The largest public cloud operators such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft have already established a presence in the region over the last few years.  And as noted in our report titled “Global cloud players look to the Asia Pacific for growth”, cloud providers such as GoDaddy, RackSpace and Digital Ocean have also set up their own data centers in countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong to better serve customers in the region.

As it is, increased intra-region integration and governmental-led initiatives to encourage economic growth are highlighted as key factors that will drive growth, according to Fred Ng, senior research analyst at Gartner.

“Increased intra-region integration in APJ across services and industries will drive public cloud usage as countries in this region break down borders through trade bloc agreements,” noted Ng, who pointed to ASEAN Economic Integration 2015 and the Trans Pacific Partnerships as examples of such trade bloc agreements.

“[These agreements will] drive more mobility, big data sharing and analytics and public cloud infrastructure and applications to support these initiatives,” he said.