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.