Cloud shows a silver lining

Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, recently reported that cloud services are shaking up the industry. “We know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations,” they wrote in a recent press release.

Here are their projections:

• The worldwide public-cloud-services market is expected to grow 17.5 per cent in 2019.
• The fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services, also called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow 27.5 per cent in 2019.
• The next-fastest-growing segment will be cloud application infrastructure services, also called Platform as a Service (PaaS), at 21.8 per cent.
• The largest cloud shift before 2018 was in Software as a Service (SaaS), where – for customer relationship management – more IT spending goes to the cloud than in traditional software. Application software will retain the highest percentage of cloud shift through 2022.
  
  

But this is only the beginning.

• Through 2022, the market size and growth of the cloud services industry will grow at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.
• According to recent Gartner surveys, more than a third of organisations see cloud investments as a top-three investing priority.
• Gartner expects that by the end of 2019, more than 30 per cent of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only. This means that licence-based software consumption will further plummet, while SaaS and subscription-based cloud consumption models will continue to rise.
  
  

A steep learning curve ahead for firms

To get onboarded onto public clouds, organisations will need cloud-related services, such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration and managed services. Gartner expects 28 per cent of spending in key IT segments to shift to cloud-based services by 2022.

In-house technology product managers for cloud-related-services offerings need to focus on delivering solutions that combine their own experience and execution with the offerings of hyperscale providers. This complementary approach will drive both transformation and optimisation of an organisation’s infrastructure and operations, says Gartner.

To succeed, firms will also need an effective strategy. Yet, according to a recent Gartner UK survey, less than one-third of enterprises currently have a documented cloud strategy.

That is why it is important for organisations to remain up to date on developments within the cloud industry and to be fully informed about what they must bring to the table to make it work. Only then can they devise an effective strategy that takes into consideration all the complexities of migrating to – and managing – the cloud.