Research from analyst firm IDC indicates that spending on public and private cloud will create nearly 14 million jobs worldwide, over 200,000 of which within the UK. This research illustrates a global extension of a similar report that the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) published in 2010. This study predicted the generation of 289,000 jobs within the UK by 2015. IDC’s research further predicts revenues of $1.1 trillion a year as a direct result of cloud innovations.

According to IDC an approximately equal number of jobs will accrue to large and small business, even though small businesses make up the majority of employment. These jobs will be generated in the communications, banking and manufacturing industries, IDC predicted. The majority of jobs will be created in emerging markets, in particular China and India, where the size of the workforce and growth potential is greater.

“We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud,” says John Gantz, SVP at IDC. “They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”

Nearly 1.2 million new cloud-computing related jobs will be generated in the U.S. and Canada, a market which currently accounts for 62 percent of worldwide spending in public IT cloud services, according to the IDC study.

IDC research also predicts smaller companies adopting cloud services at a faster rate than larger companies because budget constraints make the cost effective solution very attractive and SMEs have fewer legacy systems to deal with. “Enterprises that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget they have for more innovative project,” Gantz says.