In cloud data, Forrester found that Nine in 10 companies have some cloud footprint, even if they continue to invest in on-prem compute, and 88% of companies using public cloud do business with more than one provider. Over two-thirds of the more than 600 organizations surveyed rely on the public cloud as their primary computing platform. The Forrester report also focused on the data center buildouts by AWS, Microsoft, and Google, with all three amid costly buildouts.
Synergy Research looked at those data centers – in 2017, on-prem data centers accounted for 60% of capacity, and the firm is projecting that the number will be cut in half by 2027. The statement – growth will be unchanged for this portion of the market. Synergy predicts that cloud providers will control over half the capacity in five years, and the on-prem number will fall to 30%.
From Tech Crunch: Synergy’s spending numbers tell a clearer story: “Ten years ago, enterprises were spending over $80 billion per year on IT hardware and software for their own data centers, while spending well under $10 billion on nascent cloud infrastructure services. Fast forward to the present day, and spending on data center hardware and software has only grown by an average of 2% per year, while spending on cloud services has ballooned, growing by an average of 42% per year to reach $227 billion in 2022,” Synergy reports.
Why do we care?
The small private data center isn’t going extinct, but it’s not the area of growth nor the future. Just like mainframes of the past, they’ll be maintained over time but will not be the expansion or growth area. There’s money to be made there, yet if you’re looking for growth, you will find it in the cloud.