By the year 2020, it will be a cloudy world.
Researchers at Gartner are out this week with new predictions on what the infrastructure computing market will look like in the coming years. And they’re very bullish on the cloud. The combination of end users gaining comfort with using cloud services combined with vendors shifting to primarily offering software from the cloud means that cloud will be the dominate software deployment model within three and a half years.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: | Cloud or on-prem? This data company says they do both +
"Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner, who adds that even custom-designed software that once used to be housed primarily on customers’ premises is moving to the cloud.
Some companies have had a no-cloud policy in recent years because of perceived concerns related to security, performance or for some other reason. “Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance,” Gartner’s report on predictions for 2020 states. “Today, most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of retrofitting the technology to on-premises.
Gartner predicts that by 2019 that 30% of the 100 largest software vendors will have adopted a cloud-only model. "More leading-edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organizations closer to cloud adoption,” says Yefim V. Natis, vice president and Gartner Fellow.
This dramatic shift to the cloud will not totally replace on-premises infrastructure, however. But this shift will mean that by 2020 more compute power will be sold via the cloud than what is deployed in customers’ on-premises data centers. Gartner says this environment will be a bear to manage. "Unless very small, most enterprises will continue to have an on-premises (or hosted) data center capability,” explains Thomas Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “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 noncloud architectures, with a focus on managing cloud-delivered capacity efficiently and effectively."