Migrating to cloud native will drive services boom

As businesses adopt cloud native architectures, consulting, migration and managed services account for almost one-fifth of cloud expenditure, according to analyst Gartner.

Its latest forecast estimates that spending on cloud services will rise by 28% by 2022.

Gartner reported that the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow by 17.5% in 2019 to total $214.3bn, up from $182.4bn in 2018.

It said the fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is forecast to grow by 27.5% in 2019 to reach $38.9bn, up from $30.5bn in 2018.

Through to 2022, Gartner estimated that the cloud services industry market would grow at nearly three time the rate of overall IT services.

Gartner research vice-president Sid Nag said: “Organisations need cloud-related services to get onboarded onto public clouds and to transform their operations as they adopt public cloud services.”

Nag said that when organisations decide to migrate to the cloud, the difficulties they face include how to operationalise the move. This is where services that offer managed migration and software development resources become important. “Unless you have internal skills, work with a managed service provider,” he said.

Often, there are several steps organisations need to take during a cloud migration.

Up front, said Nag, organisations will often hire a consulting firm to conduct a readiness assessment, in which difficulties in migrating applications can be quickly identified.

Because there will be some applications that cannot simply be lifted and shifted to the cloud, Nag recommended organisations to look at their application estate to determine which applications can be retired, which ones can easily be rehosted on the cloud, and identify those that require further work.

“In a phased migration, build and run services may be done multiple times,” he said. “Software development work may be required continuously to convert applications.”

This reworking of the on-premise applications requires converting them into cloud native applications, but organisations may encounter several issues as they try to rework their applications, said Nag.

Not only is there a shortage of cloud native skills, but the tools that support cloud native architectures are also evolving, he said. This is where cloud consulting services can provide the skills and tooling to support the migration.

Nag said he expected managed services providers to play an important role as cloud service brokers, as organisations begin to adopt public cloud services from multiple providers.