By Loke Tan, Director of Product Management, Skytap

By any metric, cloud migrations continued to gather more momentum in 2021. Panorama Data Insights predicts an average annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19% for the global cloud computing market from 2021 to 2030 and Gartner predicts that spending on public cloud services will grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. By 2026 they predict that the cloud will consume 45% of all enterprise IT spending. The boom in the data center colocation market continues to grow as well. We've said goodbye to 2021, so let's explore what we're looking forward to in 2022 and beyond. 

Within this overall cloud growth, two specific trends are changing the landscape of cloud migrations: better partnerships between cloud providers, vendors and service providers, and increasing migration of complex, business-critical IBM Power workloads to the cloud.

New partnerships will help streamline even the most complicated cloud migrations, making the process quicker and easier.

The cloud migration marketplace has decided that the once time-consuming, arduous task of migrating cloud stubborn workloads is now a thing of the past. While it's been technically possible to migrate complex workloads for many years, it's gotten much easier to do so in the last few years thanks to a number of new technologies and partnerships between those vendors and the major cloud hosting providers. In turn, technology providers have partnered with system integrators and consultants to help customers through the cloud migration process. Taken together, these partnerships have made difficult migrations much simpler.

For instance, in November IT service management company Kyndryl Holdings launched strategic partnership with Microsoft Cloud to build and deploy cloud solutions and skills initiatives to quickly scale Kyndryl technical expertise in Microsoft. These types of partnerships are a win-win; take the aforementioned Microsoft Cloud / Kyndryl deal: it will go a long way in Kyndryl's plan to expand its market by focusing on analytics, while also advancing Microsoft's digital transformation effort.

Tight collaborations such as these between technology, cloud, and service providers will continue through 2022, giving customers the option to migrate even the most complicated and challenging workloads to the cloud all without placing a heavy burden on internal IT resources. This means that ISVs playing in the Migration/Data Protection space are advancing their products and licensing practices to be more cloud-friendly. This change will pressure other ISVs, who have traditionally levied inflexible licensing models on their customers, and hopefully nudge them to change their practices as well.

The IBM Power system migration market will continue to grow and strengthen.

There is still a great deal of demand for moving IBM Power systems to the cloud. A recent IT Jungle article estimated there were around 150,000 organizations globally running IBM i and AIX applications.  We estimate that less than 5% of these customers have migrated or are in the process of migrating applications to the cloud, leading us to expect the strong activity here will continue into the next year.

The pandemic accelerated cloud migrations for specific workloads, which served as proof of concepts for other workloads and systems. After gaining some experience with the cloud, organizations became more willing to consider migrating production workloads and business-critical applications. The momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Case in point: The Library of Congress is in the process of migrating its 170 million physical assets to the cloud in order to make its content available to the public from anywhere around the world. Of course, digital transformation such as this is never truly over, making it a near certainty that the cloud market will continue to speed ahead in 2022 and beyond.

There's been an explosion of interest in migrating IBM Power to the cloud, particularly IBM i application, over the last few years. Market demand for cloud IaaS, solutions and systems integrators will continue to be strong as most organizations typically do not have the IBM i expertise in-house to guide, execute and manage such complex cloud migrations.

In 2022, it is more important than ever for industry leaders to fully understand and leverage the forces at work shaping the ever-evolving data center and cloud computing space so organizations can prepare to seize all potential opportunities in the face of increasing uncertainty. What about you? What do you think the new year holds for the industries and how are you preparing for it?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Loke Tan, Director of Product Management

 

Loke Tan is a Director of Product Management at Skytap, a cloud services to run IBM Power and x86 workloads natively in the public cloud. Loke combines a strong technical development background, with experience in developer marketing, technology evangelism and social media. He was a technical product manager and developer evangelist at Microsoft for ten years and has held similar positions at Avalara and Concur.