The future of cloud: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

The direction IT architecture is heading means that IT departments will likely end up with some workloads in the private cloud, some in the public cloud, some will be cloud native and some will run on ERP business applications clouds. 

Philip Dawson, a vice president in Gartner Research says that IT needs to be able to cope with different delivery models. “You basically have to mix the applications and the delivery with the cloud instances. It's a multi-cloud architecture.”

As IT becomes more complex, Dawson urges IT leaders torationalise or retire applications. “Get rid of your dead wood and only modernise the stuff you really need to modernise,” he says, adding: “If it has high IT complexity and low business value, get rid of it. You don't need that cost.” 

This also applies to workloads migrated during the early years of cloud computing, where applications were previously moved onto public cloud infrastructure without any reworking to optimise them for the public cloud.

Even if there is an ambition to containerise 30-40% of new applications and go cloud-native, Dawson says: “You've also got to think that the two-thirds of stuff that need to be modernised such as legacy Java.net and other legacy environments.”

During the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, Dawson presented a session looking at why the future of IT infrastructure is distributed and hybrid. A distributed hybrid infrastructure incorporates cloud-native infrastructure principles, such as programmability, elasticity, modularity and resiliency and can be deployed and managed in any location the customer chooses, including on-premises, at the colocation, at the edge or in the public cloud. This, for Dawson, means having a single control plane that can manage the system in any location.