The company said total spend had grown by US$4.2 billion in 2020 and by US$621 million in the final quarter of 2020. Dollar for dollar, the annual growth was the highest in two years.

This increase was attributed in large part to the digital transformation that had been undertaken by many organisations as a result of the pandemic.

The Canalys statement said spending on cloud infrastructure by governments was set to grow in 2021 and major providers were expanding in the US and creating dedicated services.

The US (44%) was the biggest cloud market in the first quarter of 2021, followed by China with 15% of global spend. AWS (37%), Microsoft (23%) and Google (9%) were the top three providers, with 69% of the market in total.

“Cloud service providers have a big opportunity with the US Government, not only with its stated desire to modernise technologies, but also its renewed focus on cyber security efforts,” said Canalys vice-president Alex Smith.

“The recent SolarWinds hack affected nine federal agencies and the Colonial Pipeline hack exposed the high risk all organisations face.

"With intense competition over large government cloud contracts, such as the US$10 billion JEDI contract, a security advantage will pay off for bidding cloud service providers.”

Canalys research analyst Blake Murray commented: “Customers from all industries need more advanced solutions and heightened security practices from cloud service providers.

"The scale of rapid workload migration and the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments is accelerating the development of data centres’ geographic reach, capacity and security capabilities.

“Building trust between customers and cloud service providers while emphasising cloud security advantages will be deciding factors in cloud service provider competition in 2021.”