A new LogicMonitor survey of nearly 300 industry influencers predicts that enterprises will migrate the majority of their IT workloads from the data center to the cloud by 2020. Fueling this transition will be the 20.8 billion IoT devices Gartner predicts will come online, and the rapid maturation of AI and machine learning technologies. The Future of the Cloud Study also finds that while Amazon holds a dominant leadership position in the public cloud market, Microsoft and Google are closing that gap.

LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT, sponsored the survey, polling both AWS re:Invent attendees and industry analysts, media, consultants and vendor strategists to explore what the landscape for cloud services will look like in 2020. "Our customers continue to ask for guidance in planning their cloud migration strategies," said Jeff Behl, Chief Product Officer for LogicMonitor. "We designed our survey to gather feedback from some key industry influencers to understand their predictions, and to provide our customers with insights and answers."

Steady Migration to the Cloud

Survey results confirm that in the short term, 37 percent of all IT workloads will continue to run predominantly on-premises, and 31 percent will run in the public cloud. However, over the next two years, the percentage of premises-based workloads will drop to 27 percent and workloads running in the public cloud will grow to 41 percent with the balance running on private or hybrid clouds. When will 95 percent of all workloads run in the cloud? That's 10-15 years out but acceleration could pull it in.

The survey asked respondents about the key drivers of this transition: 63 percent cited Digital Transformation followed closely by IT Agility (62 percent) and DevOps (58 percent). This changes dramatically by 2020 when AI and Machine Learning takes the lead followed by IoT.

The Competition Intensifies

Respondents also expect the market to grow increasingly competitive as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform gain ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Gartner's research shows Amazon holds a 44 percent share of the overall cloud IaaS market, followed by Microsoft at 7 percent, Alibaba, 3 percent and Google trailing at 2 percent today.

Overcoming the Skills Shortage

The third largest public cloud challenge cited by respondents was that IT staff lacks cloud experience. More than a third also cited lack of visibility.

To get ahead of this, Enterprises should make it easy for IT professionals to gain complete situational awareness of all technologies in their IT stack by answering basic questions like:

• Is the technology working?
• Is performance meeting SLAs?
• Is everything within capacity limits?

One way to quickly gain situational awareness is to consider a SaaS-based performance monitoring solution that monitors everything from the data center up to and including cloud services, such as the LogicMonitor platform. "Traditionally, organizations have used various monitoring tools to keep tabs on different parts of their technology," said Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Evangelist, LogicMonitor. "Organizations really need an end-to-end monitoring solution that automatically monitors both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, services and apps to truly understand what's going on so they can continue to be agile and proactive."

To view the full report, "Future of the Cloud Study" please visit the LogicMonitor website.