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Gartner: IT Modernization Is Top Driver of Public Cloud Adoption

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.2 percent in 2016 to total $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc.

The highest growth will come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 42.8 percent in 2016.

Cloud application services (software as a service [SaaS]), one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market, is expected to grow 21.7 percent in 2016 to reach $38.9 billion.

"Growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner's 2015 cloud adoption survey," said Sid Nag, Research Director at Gartner. "However, the aspiration for using cloud services outpaces actual adoption. There's no question there is great appetite within organizations to use cloud services, but there are still challenges for organizations as they make the move to the cloud. Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organizations still have no current plans to use cloud services."

IT modernization is currently the top driver of public cloud adoption, followed by cost savings, innovation, agility and other benefits. The focus on IT modernization indicates a more sophisticated and strategic use of public cloud services. Not only are public cloud services being used to recognize the tactical benefits of cost savings and innovation, but they are also being used to establish a more modern IT environment — an environment that can serve as a strategic foundation for future applications and digital business processes.

Security and/or privacy concerns continue to be the top inhibitors to public cloud adoption, despite the strong security track record and increased transparency of leading cloud providers.

"Gartner's position on cloud security has been clear — public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner," said Ed Anderson, Research VP at Gartner. "More education is needed to help organizations overcome the hype associated with security concerns. This should be a key area of focus for providers in working with their clients to unlock the benefits of public cloud services."

Most organizations are already using a combination of cloud services from different cloud providers. While public cloud usage will continue to increase, the use of private cloud and hosted private cloud services is also expected to increase at least through 2017. The increased use of multiple public cloud providers, plus growth in various types of private cloud services, will create a multicloud environment in most enterprises and a need to coordinate cloud usage using hybrid scenarios.

Although hybrid cloud scenarios will dominate, there are many challenges that inhibit working hybrid cloud implementations. Organizations that are not planning to use hybrid cloud indicated a number of concerns, including: integration challenges, application incompatibilities, a lack of management tools, a lack of common APIs and a lack of vendor support.

"Of course in the case of hybrid cloud, these top concerns also highlight some of the top opportunities for providers," said Anderson. "We know that public cloud services will continue to grow. We also know that private cloud services (of various types) will become more widely used. Therefore, providers must focus on the top hybrid cloud challenges to be successful in meeting the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Gartner: IT Modernization Is Top Driver of Public Cloud Adoption

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.2 percent in 2016 to total $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc.

The highest growth will come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 42.8 percent in 2016.

Cloud application services (software as a service [SaaS]), one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market, is expected to grow 21.7 percent in 2016 to reach $38.9 billion.

"Growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner's 2015 cloud adoption survey," said Sid Nag, Research Director at Gartner. "However, the aspiration for using cloud services outpaces actual adoption. There's no question there is great appetite within organizations to use cloud services, but there are still challenges for organizations as they make the move to the cloud. Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organizations still have no current plans to use cloud services."

IT modernization is currently the top driver of public cloud adoption, followed by cost savings, innovation, agility and other benefits. The focus on IT modernization indicates a more sophisticated and strategic use of public cloud services. Not only are public cloud services being used to recognize the tactical benefits of cost savings and innovation, but they are also being used to establish a more modern IT environment — an environment that can serve as a strategic foundation for future applications and digital business processes.

Security and/or privacy concerns continue to be the top inhibitors to public cloud adoption, despite the strong security track record and increased transparency of leading cloud providers.

"Gartner's position on cloud security has been clear — public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner," said Ed Anderson, Research VP at Gartner. "More education is needed to help organizations overcome the hype associated with security concerns. This should be a key area of focus for providers in working with their clients to unlock the benefits of public cloud services."

Most organizations are already using a combination of cloud services from different cloud providers. While public cloud usage will continue to increase, the use of private cloud and hosted private cloud services is also expected to increase at least through 2017. The increased use of multiple public cloud providers, plus growth in various types of private cloud services, will create a multicloud environment in most enterprises and a need to coordinate cloud usage using hybrid scenarios.

Although hybrid cloud scenarios will dominate, there are many challenges that inhibit working hybrid cloud implementations. Organizations that are not planning to use hybrid cloud indicated a number of concerns, including: integration challenges, application incompatibilities, a lack of management tools, a lack of common APIs and a lack of vendor support.

"Of course in the case of hybrid cloud, these top concerns also highlight some of the top opportunities for providers," said Anderson. "We know that public cloud services will continue to grow. We also know that private cloud services (of various types) will become more widely used. Therefore, providers must focus on the top hybrid cloud challenges to be successful in meeting the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...