If cloud growth in 2021 must be summed up in a single stat, it’s this: Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud revenue will grow by 23% in 2021 for a total revenue close to $332.2 billion U.S., up from $270 billion from last year.

Of course, there is much more nuance in cloud growth, especially since so many businesses and organizations around the world have adopted the work from home model, which relies heavily on web-based public cloud services.

Tracking cloud growth isn’t easy: does cloud mean the few companies that actually provide and drive the cloud—the cloud service providers? Or the thousands more companies that run services on those clouds—

Luckily, there are a few ways to estimate, measure, and predict cloud growth. In this article, we’ll round up the most important cloud growth storylines in 2021 by looking at: