Are non-cloud-hosted services disappearing?
Recent research, conducted by an information technology research and advisory company, surveyed private sector enterprises and concluded that on-site IT services located outside data centres were disappearing fast. 451 Research found that 60% of respondents say that they will run “the majority” of their IT in cloud-hosted servers by the end of 2019. In fact, it’s predicted that 95% of data centre traffic will come from the cloud by 2021.
Why is enterprise moving services to the cloud?
Businesses are increasingly realising that IT services running from local PCs and Servers are at much greater risk from security and continuity threats than those managed by specialists in highly available data centres.
In addition the cost of Internet connectivity has fallen in big centres of commerce such as London, and the cost of fast Internet is no longer a barrier to the best solutions.
Furthermore, Cloud-hosting is centrally supported and updated, secure and controlled and always available.
Areas moving to the data centre this year
The report also summarised the main 2018 Cloud-Hosting priorities for Enterprise. Businesses have typically migrated distinct areas of IT functionality to the Cloud one-by one. They have prioritised areas based on the ease of implementation, the cost and the availability of products and availability of suppliers to enact the changes.
The top three 2018 priorities listed by the report were:
- 45 % said Business Intelligence
- 29 % pointed to Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
- 28 % mentioned Big Data
One question to ask is why is Enterprise targeting such areas? One might have expected that the simple “quick wins” such as Email, Customer Relationship Management and Accounts software would be most prominent. Organisations could virtualise the entire user desktop, meaning that everything becomes cloud-hosted, not just isolated applications. Yet none of these rated in the top 10. The answer might well be that the move to the cloud has happened much faster than most had anticipated. These areas have already been fully embraced by large enterprise. It’s certainly striking that the top three priorities are areas of activity that never happened on desktop, but on local servers instead.
