The future of IT will be multi-cloud and hybrid, according to a study published by analyst firm 451 Research.
Analysts said that 69% of respondents are planning to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019. According to its most recent Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey, the cloud is now mainstream with 90% of organisations surveyed using some type of cloud service.
It added that it expected 60% of workloads to be running in some form of hosted cloud service by 2019, up from 45% today. This represents a pivot from DIY owned and operated to cloud or hosted third-party IT services, according to 451 Research.
But it warned the growth in multi- and hybrid cloud will make optimising and analysing cloud expenditure increasingly difficult. The analysts' Digital Economics Unit looked at the scope of AWS offerings and found there are already over 320,000 SKUs in the cloud provider's portfolio. This complexity is likely to increase over time in the first two weeks of November 2017, for example, AWS added more than 53,000 new SKUs, warned the research.
"Cloud buyers have access to more capabilities than ever before, but the result is greater complexity. It is a nightmare for enterprises to calculate the cost of computing using a single cloud provider, let alone comparing providers or planning a multi-cloud strategy," said Dr Owen Rogers, research director at 451 Research. "The cloud was supposed to be a simple utility like electricity, but new innovations and new pricing models, such as AWS Reserved Instances, mean the IT landscape is more complex than ever."
According to the latest data from 451 Research's Market Monitor, the cloud computing as-a-service market is expected to grow 27% to $28.1 billion in 2017 compared to 2016. With a five-year CAGR of 19%, cloud computing as a service will reach $53.3 billion in 2021.
The report also predicted that IaaS will account for 57% of cloud computing as a service revenue in 2017. The report examines revenue generated by 451 global cloud service providers across infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), as well as infrastructure software as a service (ISaaS), which includes IT management as a service and SaaS storage (online backup/recovery and cloud archiving).
It forecasted that ISaaS will see the fastest growth through 2021 with a 21% CAGR, while Integration PaaS will be the fastest growing sector of the PaaS marketplace with a five-year CAGR of 27%.
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