Cloud-first? It’s going to be ‘cloud-only’ for most, says Gartner

• Today, most provider technology innovation is already cloud-centric
• The no-cloud position will become ‘increasingly untenable’

 
BY 2020, a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-Internet’ policy is today, according to Gartner Inc.
 
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Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large providers in recent years.
 
Today, most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of retrofitting the technology to on-premises, the research and analyst firm said in a statement.
 
“Aside from the fact that many organisations with a no-cloud policy actually have some under-the-radar or unavoidable cloud usage, we believe that this position will become increasingly untenable,” Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Mann.
 
“The cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of the public or private cloud,” he added.
 
This does not mean that everything will be cloud-based, and concern will remain valid in some cases, Gartner said. However, the extreme of having nothing cloud-based will largely disappear.
 
Hybrid will be the most common usage of the cloud, but this will require the public cloud to be part of the overall strategy.
 
Technology providers will increasingly be able to assume that their customers will be able to consume cloud capabilities.
 
Gartner made a number of further predictions, including:
 
1) By 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.
 
The now well-established stance of cloud-first in software design and planning is gradually being augmented or replaced by cloud-only. This also applies to both private and hybrid cloud scenarios.
 
“More leading-edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organisations closer to cloud adoption,” said Gartner Fellow and vice president Yefim V. Natis.
 
“While some applications and data will remain locked in older technologies, more new solutions will be cloud-based, thus further increasing demand for integration infrastructure.
 
“Rigid organisations cannot produce agile IT solutions. As delivery shifts more to the cloud, most IT organisations will have to reorganise to reflect the business realities of cloud computing: Continuous innovation and change; pervasive integration; competing with cloud providers for some initiatives; and crucial prevalence of influence over control in IT’s relationship with lines of business.
 
“While historically the greatest competitor to external service providers has been internal IT, with spend shifts, structural reorganisations and the business realities mentioned above, cloud providers will be in the position to gain the upper hand,” he added.
 
2) By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centres.
 
The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market has been growing more than 40% in revenue per year since 2011, and it is projected to continue to grow more than 25% per year through 2019.
 
By 2019, the majority of virtual machines (VMs) will be delivered by IaaS providers. By 2020, the revenue for compute IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will exceed US$55 billion – and likely pass the revenue for servers.
 
“With the growth of both bimodal computing and cloud provider offerings, software-defined enterprise data centres have become less centrally important than building a strong multiprovider management capability,” said Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Thomas J. Bittman.
 
“Unless very small, most enterprises will continue to have an on-premises (or hosted) data centre capability.
 
“But with most compute power moving to IaaS providers, enterprises and vendors need to focus on managing and leveraging the hybrid combination of on-premises, off-premises, cloud and non-cloud architectures, with a focus on managing cloud-delivered capacity efficiently and effectively,” he added.
 
Additional information is available to Gartner clients in the report Market Insight: Cloud Computing’s Drive to Digital Business Creates Opportunities for Providers.
 
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