50% Of Critical Enterprise Applications To Reside Outside Centralised Public Cloud: Gartner

By 2027, 50% of critical enterprise applications will reside outside of centralised public cloud locations, according to research and consulting firm Gartner. As cloud computing markets and data centre infrastructure evolve, and interest in migrating workloads grows, many enterprises struggle to identify the right partners and solutions.

Enterprises are beginning to seek placement for workloads that have not migrated to the public cloud. “This represents approximately 70% of all workloads, but the growing number of vendors, technologies and overlapping markets makes it difficult to identify the optimal infrastructure choice for an organisation’s unique circumstances and needs,” said Dennis Smith, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

There are options for enterprises seeking infrastructure services for their workloads that now reside on-premises, ranging from vendors’ server virtualisation offerings to services provided by public cloud providers. To determine appropriate placement strategies, Gartner recommends that infrastructure and operation leaders follow three steps.

Evaluate Infrastructure Requirements

For their current on-premises workloads, such as business-critical apps and general-purpose workloads, many enterprises are looking for cloud solutions. Although these environments are custom-made, they offer limited automation and self-service capabilities even though they are virtualised.

Gartner suggests that enterprises that expand their on-premises environments to the cloud must make sure that deployments take public cloud requirements into account. Many cloud-inspired and cloud computing solutions also offer hybrid capabilities, where common infrastructure elements and application programming interfaces can be deployed both on-premises and in the public cloud.

Embrace Hybrid Capabilities And CIPS

The ongoing need to support workloads that are located outside public cloud regions means that mixed cloud and non-cloud infrastructure will be needed in the future, Gartner said.

“Enterprises need hybrid capabilities and always will,” said Smith. “While public clouds deliver many benefits, such as innovation, agility and scalability, their utility can be limited when deployed outside the locations chosen by public cloud providers,” he added.

The market for cloud infrastructure and platform services has long-term consequences for the future of enterprise IT and is evolving into four separate markets:

• Distributed hybrid infrastructure, which addresses the limitations of a traditional on-premises infrastructure for cloud operating model benefits, provides greater consistency and availability.

• Strategic cloud platform services, which covers a range of cloud services and includes modernising legacy applications for enterprises.

• Container management, which covers a range of container management offerings, including Kubernetes platforms, cluster fleet management and serverless offerings.

• DevOps platforms, which include solutions intended to aid continuous integration, or continuous delivery.

According to Gartner, these markets reside outside server virtualisation, infrastructure consumption services, and markets related to data centre infrastructure.

“Enterprises will need to navigate both the differences and overlaps across CIPS markets to choose the appropriate workload placement,” said Smith. “This includes identifying the different personas, clarifying their requirements, across both the cloud-native infrastructure and application developer affinity vectors, and mapping them to the appropriate market.”

Choose The Right Partners And Solutions

Gartner recommends that I&O leaders must choose between vendors that take an inside-out or those with an outside-in strategy. An inside-out approach entails traditional data centre vendors that have incorporated cloud services, whereas outside-in refers to cloud companies offering on-premises services. Leaders must also choose between adopting cloud-only or cloud-first approach (SCPS market) or adopting cloud more moderately (DHI market).

“I&O leaders can select the correct infrastructure solution by performing a thorough analysis of use cases and identifying the core characteristics and capabilities needed. This will help determine the appropriate technologies and vendors that align with requirements,” said Smith.