Expenditures of enterprises with public cloud services should almost double in the next four years, says a forecast presented by the research firm Gartner.

More specifically, it expects spending to increase from 109 billion in 2012 to 207 billion dollars till 2016. The companies paid about 91 billion dollars in public cloud services in 2011, according to Gartner.

“Although the overall growth of the economy faces challenges – the crisis in the euro area, a weak U.S. recovery and the slowdown of the Chinese economy – we expect more stability,” said Richard Gordon, a vice president of research at Gartner, in notes that released on July 9 tracking data and statistics collected.

Most expenses related to cloud are what Gartner calls “business process as a service“, followed by platform as a service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

More generally, Gartner predicts that total spending on information technology should rise from $ 3.5 trillion in 2012 and 3.7 trillion in 2013.

Companies are not the only ones to get seriously in the cloud computing solutions: Gartner recently predicted that consumers will hold more than one third of their digital content in the cloud in 2016. This represents a significant increase compared to 2012 when it was estimated that seven percent of the content consumers stored in the cloud. Altogether, the research firm predicts that the average of data stored per household may increase from 464GB to 3.3TB in 2012 in 2016.

But companies are facing more challenges when it comes to adopting cloud computing than the consumer. At first, the cloud raises a number of problems related to issues ranging from regulatory requirements to other forms of encryption and data protection. Staff used to run applications internally should be instructed on how to use the cloud, while administrators and other enterprise IT professionals need to learn to handle and process all new panels so they can properly manage services online.

Although if the predictions from Gartner are proved accurate, the companies will clearly see the benefits of the cloud as something that outweigh potential costs and disadvantages. In fact, if companies remain cautious with spending, the cloud may prove a boon for growth in IT sectors and seeking revenue growth.