The global market for private cloud computing models will increase by close to 60% to $11.8 billion in the next four years, according to IT industry analyst IDC.

This growth will be driven by a combination of economic recovery and IT managers' eagerness to consolidate on their "increasingly complex" virtual and physical IT infrastructures, IDC claims.

Research by the group also showed that server sales for public cloud computing will ascend by a similar rate, albeit remaining significantly smaller, to $718 million during the same timescale.

"Now is a great time for many IT organisations to begin seriously considering this technology and employing public and private clouds in order to simplify sprawling IT environments," commented Katherine Broderick, IDC research analyst, enterprise platforms and datacenter trends. "Many vendors are strategically advancing into the private and public cloud spaces and these players are widely varied and have differing levels of commitment."

Private and public models of cloud computing differ in that the former typically see IT assets remain on-premise, but delivered in a highly-virtualised and scaleable format. In contrast, public clouds involve infrastructure and applications being consumed as part of a shared IT environment hosted in an external data centre, while also highly-virtualised and scaleable

A recent separate study, also conducted by IDC, claimed that approximately 44% of organisations were considering the use of private clouds.