By 2020, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare as a "no-internet" policy is today, according to Gartner. Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large providers in recent years, said Gartner. Today, most provider technology innovation is cloud-centric, with the stated intent of retrofitting 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, research vice president at Gartner. "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 public or private cloud."
Gartner, however notes that this does not mean that everything will be cloud-based, and concern will remain valid in some cases. 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 public cloud to be part of the overall strategy, according to Gartner.
Gartner made a number of further predictions, including:
- by 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors' new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.
- by 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.
- 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 $55 billion — and likely pass the revenue for servers.
