3 Lessons About the Future of the Cloud
April 06, 2018

Steve Francis
LogicMonitor

Share this

Most companies are adopting a cloud strategy. In ServiceNow's Cloud Tipping Point Survey, half of all enterprises reported they are now "cloud-first," meaning that the next workload they deploy will go to the cloud instead of their data center.

It took 20 years from the time the term "cloud computing" was coined to reach this milestone. When will we be at a point where virtually all enterprise workloads are run in the cloud and how will that change things for IT?

To find out, we commissioned our own survey, Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud. We started with a group of core influencers – people whose job it is to follow cloud computing. This group of 88 "cloud cognoscenti" included industry analysts, media, consultants and cloud vendors. We then followed that up with another survey fielded at the 2017 AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas where we received 195 additional responses from the people tasked with workload deployments in the real world.


The results were fascinating. I'll share three fundamental lessons we learned in the survey as well as some advice for going forward.

Lesson 1: The Reasons Why Enterprises Embrace Cloud Computing Are Changing

Why do enterprises use cloud today? The drivers of cloud computing today will sound very familiar: digital transformation, IT agility and the rise of the DevOps culture.

Those make perfect sense. Digital transformation aims to put the customer at the center of a company's automation strategy, and cloud is an excellent way to accomplish that. IT agility is much easier to achieve when someone else is responsible for your infrastructure, and you can focus on applications. The DevOps culture relies on cloud computing to achieve the speed and efficiency it was designed to deliver.

But by 2020 we expect those drivers to shift, revealing a new top-driver: artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning. That wasn't what I expected, but it makes sense.

First, AI provides the ability to extract insight from the massive "data lakes" that enterprises are collecting about their application performance and behavior. Similarly, public cloud provides the scale to provide the massive compute resources AI needs.

But more than storage and compute, the public cloud is quickly becoming a hub for AI services that developers can integrate to build sophisticated AI applications. AWS, for example, has been busy adding Machine Learning-as-a-Service capabilities.

Lesson 2: It's Going to be a Hybrid World for the Foreseeable Future

ServiceNow's survey showed that half of all enterprises are now cloud-first, but that means half are not. And, even if an enterprise is cloud-first, it will still have many legacy workloads in an on-premises data center.

We asked survey respondents to forecast when they felt nearly all (95 percent) workloads would finally be in the cloud. Predictably, a few enthusiastic cloud supporters predicted this would happen within one year (6 percent) or two years (9 percent). However, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) felt that we won't reach the 95 percent threshold for 7 years or more. In fact, one in eight respondents say we'll never reach that important threshold.

Clearly, we'll be living in a world with both on-premises and cloud workloads for the foreseeable future.

Lesson 3: AWS Dominates, But The Marketshare Race Isn't Over

Amazon's AWS has been an amazing success. Analysts report that AWS enjoys 47 percent of the public cloud market today, with Microsoft Azure at 10 percent and Google Cloud Platform at 4 percent. Other companies, such as IBM Softlayer, make up the remainder with 2 percent or less each. That's a commanding lead, but will it hold going forward?

Industry influencers expect both Microsoft and Google to gain ground against AWS going forward. They forecast that by 2020 AWS will grow slightly to a 52 percent market share, with Microsoft growing to 21 percent and Google growing to 18 percent. Those are impressive gains in a short period of time, and point to a robustly competitive market for public cloud.

Reas Part 2: How to Prepare for the Future of the Cloud

Steve Francis is the Founder of LogicMonitor
Share this

The Latest

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...

November 05, 2024

The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps. To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience ...

November 04, 2024

Users have become digital hoarders, saving everything they handle, including outdated reports, duplicate files and irrelevant documents that make it difficult to find critical information, slowing down systems and productivity. In digital terms, they have simply shoved the mess off their desks and into the virtual storage bins ...

November 01, 2024

Today we could be witnessing the dawn of a new age in software development, transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is AI a gateway or a precipice? Is AI in software development transformative, just the latest helpful tool, or a bunch of hype? To help with this assessment, DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry to comment on how AI can support the SDLC. In this epic multi-part series to be posted over the next several weeks, DEVOPSdigest will explore the advantages and disadvantages; the current state of maturity and adoption; and how AI will impact the processes, the developers, and the future of software development ...

October 31, 2024

Half of all employees are using Shadow AI (i.e. non-company issued AI tools), according to a new report by Software AG ...

October 30, 2024

On their digital transformation journey, companies are migrating more workloads to the cloud, which can incur higher costs during the process due to the higher volume of cloud resources needed ... Here are four critical components of a cloud governance framework that can help keep cloud costs under control ...

October 29, 2024

Operational resilience is an organization's ability to predict, respond to, and prevent unplanned work to drive reliable customer experiences and protect revenue. This doesn't just apply to downtime; it also covers service degradation due to latency or other factors. But make no mistake — when things go sideways, the bottom line and the customer are impacted ...

October 28, 2024

Organizations continue to struggle to generate business value with AI. Despite increased investments in AI, only 34% of AI professionals feel fully equipped with the tools necessary to meet their organization's AI goals, according to The Unmet AI Needs Surveywas conducted by DataRobot ...

October 24, 2024

High-business-impact outages are costly, and a fast MTTx (mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR)) is crucial, with 62% of businesses reporting a loss of at least $1 million per hour of downtime ...