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Growing Demand for Adaptable Hybrid IT Infrastructure

It's a given, cloud computing will become an essential component of every enterprise Digital Transformation agenda. By 2020, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

Cloud-first is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large IT vendors in recent years. Today, most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of adapting the technology to on-premises.

"Aside from the fact that many organizations with a no-cloud policy actually have some under-the-radar or unavoidable cloud usage, we believe that this position will become increasingly untenable," said Jeffrey Mann, vice president at Gartner.

The Adaptive Hybrid IT Foundation

According to the Gartner assessment, cloud services will often be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.

This doesn't mean that everything will be cloud-based. Hybrid cloud will become the most common usage model -- where on-premises data centers, hosted private and public cloud are all potential components of a flexible and adaptive IT infrastructure strategy.

Other Gartner cloud-related predictions include:

By 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest IT vendors' new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only scenarios. The now well-established stance of cloud-first in software design and planning is gradually being augmented or replaced by cloud-only. Gartner believes that this also applies to private and hybrid cloud scenarios.

More leading-edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organizations closer to cloud adoption. 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.

As delivery shifts more to the cloud, most IT organizations will have to reorganize 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.

By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market has been growing more than 40 percent in revenue per year since 2011, and it is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent per year through 2019.

Furthermore, by 2019, the majority of virtual machines (VMs) will be delivered by IaaS providers. By 2020, Gartner predicts that the revenue for compute IaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will exceed $55 billion -- and likely pass the revenue for traditional servers.

Most enterprises will continue to have an on-premises (or hosted) data center capability. But with most compute power moving to IaaS providers, enterprises and vendors need to focus on managing and leveraging the best-fit hybrid combination of on-premises, off-premises, cloud and non-cloud IT architectures.

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