Cloud Services for small and medium businesses (SMB) is a $45bn industry, according to a new study by cloud hosting firm Parallels.

It was found that 22 per cent of SMBs are currently managing websites through cloud services with another 30 per cent of SMBs planning to adopt cloud-based website management tools by 2015.

“Cloud computing has given SMBs access to computing power, applications, and services that were formerly available only to large enterprises,” Parallels wrote in its study.

“Looking at the global IT landscape in 2012, we see SMBs’ participation in the cloud market spanning the full gamut – from having a mature cloud services market to needing education about what cloud services are.”

According to Parallels, the SMB market for cloud services will be worth $68bn by 2014, double its total estimated worth in 2011.

Parallels expects to see major growth in the hosted infrastructure and business applications segment of SMB cloud computing.

The study projects that the hosted infrastructure space will be worth $27bn in 2014. Parallels reported that the space garnered $14bn in 2011.

Cloud-based business applications for SMBs are also expected to double in 2014. Parallels says the industry segment will be worth $20bn next year. Cloud business applications only garnered $9bn in the SMB market in 2011.

The growth of the industry stems from two reasons. SMBs are now seeing an advantage to moving their in-house solutions to the cloud, while firms are now “leapfrogging” traditional in-house IT for cloud-based systems.

“[Some] SMBs that currently have no in-house IT solution and are moving, or planning to move, straight to the cloud. [They’re] ‘leapfrogging’ the typical intermediate step of purchasing in-house IT,” continued the firm in its study.

“These companies might have rudimentary IT components, such as external hard drives for storage or Excel workbooks for accounting, but they don’t have the kind of in-house infrastructure that the cloud converters do.”