Centre of gravity to shift to a public cloud model in long-term

• Hybrid cloud is the operating model for many customers at present, Gartner analyst says.
• Agility and innovation are much faster and easier to do in the public cloud than in any hybrid estate, apart from its scalable nature.
• Public cloud providers are reaching out into the private estate and building the distributed cloud where there is consistency in cloud capabilities.
• By 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending is expected to exceed 45 per cent of all enterprise IT spending, up from below 17 per cent in 2021.

The market is going to move to a public cloud consumption model because of its scalable nature while agility and innovation are much faster and easier to do in the public cloud than in any hybrid estate, an industry expert said.

“Although, we do see a proliferation of special case of hybrid which is distributed cloud and all the public cloud providers are building in private cloud solutions like AWS Outpost, Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Google Athos, IBM Satellite, Oracle Cloud@Customer, etc.,” Sid Nag, Research Vice-President at Gartner, told TechChannel News.

According to Gartner, the distributed cloud is a cloud model that incorporates the physical location of cloud-delivered services as part of its definition and has three origins – public cloud, hybrid cloud and edge computing.

Public cloud providers have supported multiple zones and regions for many years. With packaged hybrid offerings, public cloud services (often including necessary hardware and software) can now be distributed to different physical locations, for instance, the edge.

By 2024, most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need.

Another industry expert said that public cloud providers use the distributed cloud model to enable lower latency and provide better performance and use cases for the cloud.

Distributed cloud model

Nag said that the public cloud providers are reaching out into the private estate and building the distributed cloud where there is consistency in cloud capabilities across the public and the private cloud facilities where there is a single control plane under a single franchise.

Spending on public cloud services is expected to reach $396 billion this year and grow 21.7 per cent to reach $482 billion in 2022, according to Gartner.

By 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending is expected to exceed 45 per cent of all enterprise IT spending, up from below 17 per cent in 2021.

In the longer term, Nag said that the centre of gravity is going to shift to the public cloud.

However, he said that many workloads are probably not suited to move to the public cloud for a variety of unfounded reasons such as security, governance, data residency and a host of other things.

“Some of the workloads are not ready to move to the public cloud as some are written in older codes and just by moving it as is to the public cloud, customers don’t get the full benefit. That is why we see that hybrid cloud is the operating model for many customers at present,” he said.

The pandemic has forced organisations to modernise environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities.

Inconsistency issues

However, Nag said that it is not easy to move from on-prem to the public cloud as organisations need to have the skills in-house to do it or hire a third party global systems integrator to get it done.

“If organisations try to manage two separate states on public and private and if they don’t go in the distributed model, they are dealing with two different vendors – one providing private cloud solution and the other providing public cloud solution – they will have inconsistency issues as they don’t have a single control, management and orchestration control plane or service mesh. Then, they need to learn different skills to run and operate these two different technologies from different vendors,” he said.

That is why; he said that over 50 per cent of the enterprises are engaging a third party to get onboard to a public cloud due to the shortage of skills.

Interoperability and portability issues between the public cloud and the on-premise private cloud providers are key barriers to hybrid cloud adoption as cloud providers develop their proprietary services to lock in customers, differentiate their services and achieve a market monopoly.

When asked whether common standards between the cloud providers are needed, Nag said that common interoperability standards are beneficial but it is not going to happen.

“As competition is so fierce, each cloud provider is going to continue to rate and do things differently to attract their customer base,” he said.

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