Total cloud IT infrastructure spending grew by 14.4% in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to the International Data Corporation.

The research firm says total cloud IT infrastructure spending grew (server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) year over year to $8 billion in 4Q14, accounting for approximately 30% of all IT infrastructure spend, up from about 27% one year ago.

Private cloud infrastructure spending grew by 18.3% year over year to $2.9 billion, while public cloud infrastructure spending grew to $5.0 billion, 12.3% higher than one year ago.

IDC says for the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totalled $26.4 billion, up 18.7% year over year from $22.3 billion; private cloud spending was just under $10.0 billion, up 20.7% year over year, while public cloud spending was $16.5 billion, up 17.5% year over year.

"The transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures within enterprises' datacenters continues to accelerate, yet the expansion of public cloud infrastructure in service providers' datacenters around the world is an even larger driver of IT spending," says Richard Villars, vice president, Datacenter and Cloud research at IDC. "A key driver of this acceleration is organisations' development and use of new Internet of Things services that require levels of agility and scale that only cloud solutions can deliver."

For this second quarterly release of cloud IT market results, IDC has expanded its worldwide coverage to include detail for eight regions: Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), Canada, Central - Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, Middle East - Africa, USA, and Western Europe.

In 4Q14, USA had the highest share of overall cloud IT infrastructure spending with 64%, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) with 17% and Western Europe with 12%. Western Europe had the highest growth in cloud IT infrastructure spending with 30% year-over-year growth.