Corporate “no-cloud” policies will be as rare as “no-Internet” policies by 2020: Gartner

By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-Internet” policy is today, according to a new report from information technology research and advisory company Gartner, Inc.

Cloud-first, and even cloud-only, is replacing the defensive no-cloud stance that dominated many large providers in recent years, Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner said in a statement on Wednesday. However, Gartner stressed that this does not mean that everything will be cloud-based and “concern will remain valid in some cases. But the extreme of having nothing cloud-based will largely disappear.”

Hybrid will be the most common usage of the cloud, but this will require public cloud to be part of the overall strategy, Gartner noted in the report, titled Market Insight: Cloud Computing’s Drive to Digital Business Creates Opportunities for Providers. Technology providers will increasingly be able to assume that their customers will be able to consume cloud capabilities, Gartner said.

“Aside from the fact that many organizations with a no-cloud policy actually have some under-the-radar or unavoidable cloud usage, we believe that this position will become increasingly untenable,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner, in the statement. “Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.”

Gartner made a number of other predictions, including that by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from “cloud-first” to “cloud-only.” The now well-established stance of cloud-first in software design and planning is gradually being augmented or replaced by cloud-only, Gartner added, referring to private and hybrid cloud scenarios.

“More leading-edge IT capabilities will be available only in the cloud, forcing reluctant organizations closer to cloud adoption,” suggested Yefim V. Natis, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “While some applications and data will remain locked in older technologies, more new solutions will be cloud-based, thus further increasing demand for integration infrastructure.

As delivery shifts more to the cloud, Natis continued, most IT organizations will have to reorganize to reflect the business realities of cloud computing: continuous innovation and change, pervasive integration, competing with cloud providers for some initiatives and crucial prevalence of influence over control in IT’s relationship with lines of business. “While historically the greatest competitor to external service providers has been internal IT, with spend shifts, structural reorganizations and the business realities mentioned above, cloud providers will be in the position to gain the upper hand,” Natis said.