The industry shift to public cloud, a $208 billion market, is the single most disruptive trend facing IT buyers and decision makers in 2016. Enterprises are increasingly transitioning from developing, hiring and staffing IT talent to utilizing IT as a service. In our hosted event (AMZN) - AWS Center of Excellence Partner's Outlook we explore the benefits, concerns and drawbacks to migrating infrastructure and data ecosystems into the cloud. Business drivers for moving to the cloud include reduced cost, reduced time to market, operational efficiencies, the shift in costs from CAPEX to OPEX and increased business agility (Capgemini).
Despite 41% of all enterprise workloads currently running in some type of public or private cloud, with 60% of all workloads expected to shift by mid-2018, there still exist significant obstacles to cloud adoption (451 Research). The fear of security breaches, issues with data sovereignty, lack of integration and lack of a clear cloud strategy top the list of impediments preventing cloud uptake (Capgemini). Our hosted event (GOOGL) - A Cloud Reseller & Service Partner's Outlookprovides insight into cloud friendly and unfriendly workloads, as well as the uncertain future of hybrid cloud, which allows enterprises to connect and leverage both public cloud infrastructure and on-premise or hosted infrastructure. Our expert on MSFT Azure - Gold Cloud Partner's Insight into Win Rates vs. AWS offers a contrarian perspective, arguing that hybrid cloud will be the preferred infrastructure of choice for the foreseeable future.
Major public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service vendors stand to benefit from this trend. However, the opposite holds true for networking, storage, infrastructure outsourcing and licensed software maintenance providers. Massive growth, innovation and investment in cloud destroys many, if not most legacy business models and renders them obsolete. Traditional hardware vendors feel the brunt of cloud adoption and flee the public market as their offerings become commoditized in a “Cloud First” world.
