Hybrid cloud to prevail by 2020: Gartner

By Richard van der Draay

Hybrid will be the most commonly used cloud model by 2020 while a corporate ‘nocloud’ strategy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today, according to Gartner. 

Drawing on strategic planning assumptions from its global ‘Market Insight: Cloud Computing’s Drive to Digital Business Creates Opportunities for Providers’ report, the firm said cloud-first and cloud-only approaches were fast replacing the defensive nocloud stance it said had dominated the mindset of many large service providers in recent years.

“[Currently] most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of retro-fitting the technology to on-premises,” said Gartner, predicting that by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ investments in new software products will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.  “Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment,” said Gartner research VP Jeffrey Mann. “The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.”  While Mann noted that this didn’t mean everything would be cloud-based – and that concerns would remain valid in some cases – he predicted that the extreme position of having nothing cloud-based would by and large disappear.

“Hybrid will be the most common usage of the cloud; but this will require public cloud to be part of the overall strategy,” he said. “Technology providers will increasingly be able to assume that their customers will be able to consume cloud capabilities.”

Gartner expects that by 2020, more compute power will have been sold by infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service providers than that sold and rolled out into enterprise datacentres. It said that by the end of 2016, 40% of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees and 80% of organizations with over 10,000 employees would have policies and practices in place to approve and track the use of SaaS.  “More leading edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organizations closer to cloud adoption,” said Gartner VP Yefim Natis.

(This article first appeared in www.commsday.com)