Nearly Seven in 10 Enterprises Will Have Multi-Cloud or Hybrid IT Environments By 2019, 451 Research Finds

451 Research’s most recent Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey finds that cloud is now mainstream with 90 percent of organizations surveyed using some type of cloud service. Moreover, analysts expect 60 percent of workloads to be running in some form of hosted cloud service by 2019, up from 45 percent today. This represents a pivot from DIY-owned and operated to cloud or hosted third-party IT services.

451 Research finds that the future of IT is multi-cloud and hybrid with 69 percent of respondents planning to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019. The growth in multi- and hybrid cloud will make optimizing and analyzing cloud expenditure increasingly difficult.

The scope of Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings reveals that there are already over 320,000 SKUs in the cloud provider’s portfolio. This complexity is likely to increase over time – in the first two weeks of November 2017, for example, AWS added more than 53,000 new SKUs.

“Cloud buyers have access to more capabilities than ever before, but the result is greater complexity. It is a nightmare for enterprises to calculate the cost of computing using a single cloud provider, let alone comparing providers or planning a multi-cloud strategy,” said Dr. Owen Rogers, Research Director at 451 Research. “The cloud was supposed to be a simple utility like electricity, but new innovations and new pricing models, such as AWS Reserved Instances, mean the IT landscape is more complex than ever.”

Flexibility has become the new pricing battleground over the past three months, with Google, Microsoft and Oracle all announcing new pricing models targeted at AWS. Analysts believe there will be a market opportunity for cloud dealers that can resolve this complexity, giving users simple and low-cost prices – in much the same way that consumer energy suppliers abstract away the complexity of global energy markets.

451 Research’s quarterly Cloud Price Index continues to track the global cost of public and private clouds from over 50 cloud providers. The latest data from 451 Research’s Market Monitor finds that the cloud computing as a service market is expected to grow 27 percent to $28.1 billion in 2017 compared to 2016. With a five-year combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19 percent, cloud computing as a service will reach $53.3 billion in 2021.

(For more information visit https://451research.com).