Moving from Cloud First to Cloud Only

According to a recent Gartner report, companies are moving from a Cloud first to a Cloud only approach. Pretty much every time I read or hear something with “all” or “everything” implied as part of the statement, it makes my Spidey senses tingle. As I don’t like to “always” trust my assumptions, I decided to ask my broad and deep community of smart folks what their thoughts on the following three questions were:

1.     Will we reach an equilibrium eventually of on-prem/colo and public cloud

2.     Will we go all public cloud in 10 years or less

3.     Are we seeing a significant movement by enterprises to pull back some workloads from public?

My simple assumptions (expressed in my blog from Oct 2017 on LinkedIn) are that we will likely get to a balance of public cloud, colo and enterprise data center use over the next 5 years. I do not think the enterprise data center will disappear, but I do think their use will shrink significantly. I think colocation companies that offer differentiation of services will continue to thrive and public cloud will likely approach 25-30% of TAM for the IaaS type market.

If I were to change anything in my Oct 2017 blog, it would be to update it with my hypothesis of what a blooming Edge Marketplace might do to the data center and public cloud markets.

The good news is that I received an incredible amount of feedback to my questions, the better news (for my delicate ego) was that many of the responses agreed with my assumptions.

Feedback from many big thinkers and doers in the IT world

Responses to the questions I posed in my LinkedIn feed

1.     Will we reach an equilibrium eventually of on-prem/colo and public cloud

2.     Will we go all public cloud in 10 years or less

3.     Are we seeing a significant movement by enterprises to pull back some workloads from public?

Most responders felt that there would continue to be a distribution of applications between public cloud, on-prem and colocation. However, few felt it would be an “Equilibrium” but rather a fluctuating value for each based on a combination of opportunity and enterprise demands.

My Blog from June 2018 “To Public Cloud or Not to Public Cloud”

Virtually no one said we would be “all public cloud” in ten years. There were many references to the fact that there is no “one size fits all”.

There were also several first-hand examples of companies pulling back some workloads from public cloud for a variety of reasons, including cost.

There were several comments suggesting that the enterprise data center is likely to continue to shrink, but that part of the displaced work would end up in colocation facilities as they provide the benefits of more ownership flexibility on shorter time scales as compared to the 10-20-year real estate decision you make when building your own.

My Blog from Oct 2017 “Why Adoption of Public Cloud Won’t Exceed 17% of TAM”

Synopsis

There were a ton of people responding to this post who are a lot smarter than I am, but I think it’s clear that none of us “know” the answers. However, the experience from many in this group cannot be discounted. There are contributors here who have moved data centers to the cloud, some who have moved applications back from the cloud and there are infrastructure builders and cloud builders. I’ve helped build data centers, cloud infrastructure and run large IT organizations and the only thing I can be sure of is that “always” never is.

Public cloud will continue to grow as there is still (even at an eventual 50% of TAM) a 200% plus runway of growth opportunity without even considering continued organic growth of environments. As for Colocation, if even a small percentage of the 500,000 global private data centers move to colocation, that vertical also has a 100 - 150% growth opportunity.

I think a great take away from this is that we do our customers a disservice when we tell them “Everything should be like this”.

Please follow the contributors listed below (on Twitter and or LinkedIn) if you’d like to gain further wisdom from their experience. Also, feel free to dive deeper into the responses from these folks on the LinkedIn post that spurred the writing of this blog.

Ralph Loura CIO Lumentum @RalphLoura

Lori MacVittie Principle Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO at F5 @lmacvittie 

Anthony Wanger Entrepreneur and Investor @AnthonyWanger

William Dougherty VP IT and Security Omada Health @bdognet

Sarbjeet Johal Cloud Consultant (Architecture & Migrations) @sarbjeetjohal

Tim Crawford CIO Strategic Advisor at Avoa @tcrawford 

Bruce Taylor Director Strategic Advisory @BTaylor_DXP

Jo Peterson VP Cloud Services @digitalcloudgal 

Bill Kleyman EVP Digital Solutions Switch @QuadStack 

Joshua Au Head Data Centre A-Star

Rob Hirschfeld CEO & Founder RackN @zehicle 

Ryan Fay CIO ACI Specialty Benefits @ryancfay 

Eion Jennings Director Cloud Services and Alliances @eoin_jennings 

Brandon Williams CEO CPlane.AI @cplaneai

Jan Wiersma Chief Cloud Officer and COO Spoken @jmwiersma 

Mehboob Alam Senior Solutions Architect Nutanix @thinkx 

Jack Vonich @jvonich

Mike D. Kail @mdkail

Wayne Bianca

Gary Dick Project Manager, IT at Sappi North America