There has been a substantial shift in the workload to the cloud environment with dramatic workload migration expected within the next two years, from current 41% to over 60%. On premise to off premise shift is expected from 35% to 52%, and significant expansion of public clouds (IaaS and SaaS) is predicted as workload execution venues. – 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation, Workloads & Key Projects 2016.
As per another study by 451 Research – Grand Strategy for Digital Transformation: Partner for Success, the cloud share in hosting and cloud market is expected to increase from 7% in 2010 to 43% by 2020.
Out of 1721 respondents, including SMBs, organizations and companies in over 10 geographical locations, over 66% chose hosted private cloud, 61% chose dedicated servers, 60% opted for public cloud/ Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), 53% basic website hosting and 39% chose bare metal servers for infrastructure services that they plan to use in the coming year.
With the cloud, the trend seems to favor managed services, those that are bundled with at least one managed or security service. Enterprises in all the regions responded that of their current spending on hosting and cloud infrastructure, over 62% is spent on the managed services, while 38% is spent on unmanaged services. Out of the total hosting and cloud spending, 46% of the budget is allocated for the basic infrastructure, while 54% is spent on managed services/security services.
Over 84% organizations favored spending on managed or bundled service for their next hosting and cloud infrastructure engagement.
Describing how their organization will use different on-premises and off-premises environments over the next 2 years, 31% told that their focus will be primarily on a single cloud environment and not multiple clouds. 28% favoured multiple different cloud environments, but with little or no interoperability between them. 25% responded that they will have multiple cloud environments to migrate workloads or data between different cloud environments. Only 15% said that they will have multiple cloud environments where single business function will be delivered across different cloud environments.
The main drivers for adoption of hybrid cloud or multi cloud environments, include:
- Flexibility and choice, as applications or workloads can operate in most fit IT environment with security, data residency, application workload characteristics, end user demands/ traffic etc.
- Organizations can extend the IT resource capacity of existing on-premises infrastructure without capital expense.
- Enterprises can maximize return on existing on-premises IT investments for existing applications/workloads, but use public cloud/IaaS for new applications/workloads.
- Organizations can establish the right balance between speed/agility/innovation and security/risk.
- Organizations can integrate core business systems and data (“systems of record”) to enable interaction with customer-/end user-facing digital initiatives (“systems of engagement”).
- They can support the development lifecycle: private cloud for production and public cloud for development/test.
- Their need for an off-site location for backup /disaster recovery/business continuity.
As per the study, 61% used Microsoft Azure, 53% Google cloud Platform, 46% used AWS, 43% used IBM SoftLayer and 33% organizations used VMware vCloud Air as their public cloud/IaaS platform as part of their hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
