Do you believe that within a year, a quarter of enterprises will have moved entirely to the cloud? Do you believe that almost one in five are already there? I don’t, not for a minute, and because I’m going to dispute these numbers, I’m not going to cite the source. I think it’s important to know what’s going on in the cloud, and so I’ll offer my own insights, based on surveying nearly 300 enterprises with good continuity for four decades.
Before I start, I want to note that surveying is a lot harder than it seems. The problem is that even if survey questions are carefully designed, about a third of people who take surveys will give answers that are totally incorrect, meaning that their company doesn’t do, or have, what they say. When questions are not properly designed, ignorance can result in a finding that’s so totally wrong it’s laughable.
Example: Back in the early days of ATM (remember that?), a big proponent of ATM commissioned a study on ATM adoption. I was asked to review the questions, and I pointed out that the question “Does your company use ATM?” wasn’t going to yield useful results based on my experience. They then proposed to spell out the acronym (asynchronous transfer mode), and I was still not a fan. I asked them to add the question “If yes, at what speed is ATM delivered?”. The results came in, and over two-thirds of responses said they used ATM, the kind that ran at 9600 bps! Obviously, they mistook async communications, and modems, for ATM.
A second problem is that you have to ask people who actually would likely know the answer. I’ve found that you can ask a CIO, a CFO, the head of data center operations, and a director of software development a question about IT spending and directions, and hope to get an accurate response. Any other source is problematic, and of course most surveys ask people much lower down the organization. Often, they don’t know, but who’s going to tell a nice survey person they have no idea what their company’s cloud usage is? They’ll make something up.
OK, let’s go to the reality of the cloud, as far as my latest contacts go. Of 277 companies in the survey, half of whom were enterprises and half mid-sized businesses, three had totally moved to the cloud, and those three were mid-sized businesses. No enterprise had moved, and no enterprise said they were contemplating such a move. On the other hand. All of the enterprises said that they used public cloud services, and all of them said that they expected to increase their public cloud use in 2020 and again in 2021.
You might wonder whether the issue here is that “moving everything to the cloud” might mean fully adopting private cloud or public cloud, but that’s not what companies say. If “private cloud” means deploying cloud technology on the premises, there are a dozen companies who propose that, and admittedly about half are interested in the concept. However, if “moving everything to the cloud” includes hybrid cloud, meaning a partnership between cloud and data center, then the survey data is perhaps even pessimistic. All of the enterprises I talked with already use hybrid cloud. About half of SMBs do as well. Many of the SMBs mix data center and cloud usage, using SaaS public cloud services for some applications and their own hosting for others, so they’re not strictly hybrid cloud users.
What enterprises want from “the cloud” boils down to two things. Architecturally, they want a model of “elastic computing” that’s applicable to all their hosting, whether in the data center or in public clouds. This can be achieved most easily, say the enterprises, through adoption of container orchestration. Financially, they want to be able to shift work across all their hosting options to reflect the best price/feature balance available. Dynamic shifting would be nice, but it’s a requirement primarily for the front-end piece. Planned migration is accepted for the back-end part, and very few enterprises plan to migrate that piece in the near term.
The near-term focus of cloud adoption is the creation of mobile and web front-ends to traditional applications, which enable easier consumer, partner, and employee access to applications using traditional phone/browser technology. This sometimes involves tweaks to the data center stuff, but the development work is totally cloud-focused.
That might be the reason the survey results overstate cloud penetration. The squeaky wheel gets the oil; the majority of IT people will be focused on the work they’re doing. If it’s all cloud work, they may not see the residual pieces of the application, running as usual in the usual places. And make no mistake, the great majority of current development work is focused on that front-end piece, a piece that’s almost a given for cloud hosting.
Would it be possible that enterprises would shift all their work to the cloud? If that’s without constraining the time period, most enterprises say it would be possible. If asked whether they expect that to happen within five years, the majority will say they do not; about ten percent think it might be possible in three years, and only 20% in five years.
I’m not dissing the cloud here; most of you know I’m a long-standing cloud fan. I am concerned about information that would possibly contaminate application and technology planning. We need to know the truth about the cloud, just as we need to know the truth about any technology concept, product, or service. A project cannot succeed, no matter how well it’s executed, if it’s aiming at an unattainable goal. If most enterprises are not abandoning their data centers, then you should assume that the collective reasoning of professionals in those enterprises is that it would be a bad idea.
We need to transform applications to an architectural model that can exploit the cloud optimally. We need to be able to organize the deployment and lifecycle management of these applications across all the hosting options that such a model would facilitate. These goals would acknowledge that most enterprises won’t fully shift to cloud hosting, which is true, but would also acknowledge that all enterprises will want to exploit the cloud’s unique properties. That’s true too, and true already.