Summary Bullets:
- When it comes to enterprise data and analytics investments among enterprise IT buyers, recent GlobalData research points to a future dominated by all things cloudy.
- But, how are enterprise buyers prioritizing a move to the cloud based on their current stance on cloud vs. premises prioritization? We dive into a new survey of more than 3,000 IT practitioners to find out.
In last week’s blog post on the topic of cloud migration priorities among IT buyers, we dipped a figurative toe into our newly concluded survey of more than 3,000 global IT professionals and discovered that when it comes to big data and artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud reigns supreme. As an example, we found that big data platforms on their own saw a massive 19% increase in spending over the past year, with 69% of IT budget holders setting ‘cloud’ money aside for data at scale across the enterprise. Across the board, we expect a 13% increase in investments among those currently leveraging the cloud.
But, how does that compare to those not currently leveraging the cloud? Let’s find out.
In our study, we took a look at current and planned budget priorities not just for big data, but also for AI, business intelligence (BI), social media monitoring, and data management (predominantly data warehousing). We found that the cloud dominated future spending priorities across the board. But, for those currently prioritizing on-premises deployments, future cloud investments vary wildly depending on workload (See Figure 1).
(Figure 1)
There are very few prioritizing AI investments on premises, both now and in the future. And yet, for current investments in social media monitoring and data management/data warehousing (DW) solutions, premises deployment priorities far outweighed future cloud opportunities. There’s actually a 17% swing between cloud-first AI workloads and what has historically been a cloud-never endeavor with data management. Conversely, data-heavy endeavors like big data and BI both show no increase in prioritization between current premises and future cloud investments.
Clearly, the management of huge amounts of data still smiles favorably on premises deployment models. The same holds true for workloads that concern potentially sensitive data, as with customer marketing and customer relationship management solutions. It’s easy to see issues of data sovereignty and legislative constraints such as GDPR playing a continued role here.
Why, then, are we seeing such a sudden shift in future priorities from premises to cloud for data management in particular? We believe this extreme jump in cloud investment heralds the arrival of what some would call a sea change or tipping point in the market. It’s as if overnight the value proposition of the cloud suddenly and convincingly outweighs both security and performance concerns. We put this sea change down to the following factors.
- Economies of Scale: The long tail economies of mega public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services are lowering long-term management and storage for data, not just application workload. The same goes for security concerns, particularly for small to mid-sized customers.
- Bring Your Own License: Thanks to virtualization and containerization, public cloud providers are now offering compelling licensing models that won’t penalize customers for moving investments around between the two worlds. Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Benefit is a good example of this approach.
- We’ll Move It for You: Public cloud platform providers have gotten very good at helping customers move on-premises data to the cloud, often free of charge and via either network or physical boxes. Customers get a box in the mail, upload their data to that box, and simply mail it back to the vendor. In extreme cases, cloud providers will even park a secure shipping container in the parking lot to help ease the move.
- Partner Smart: Data migration at any scale is a task not for the faint of heart. For that reason, most public cloud providers have worked with data integration specialists like Informatica and Attunity to operationalize the entire process. Most of these data specialists can perform this same service across all major cloud platforms, as is the case with Attunity CloudBeam, which can readily migrate/replicate data to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
- All Clouds Look the Same to a DBA: Thanks in part to decades of standardization among database vendors and the dominance of open source software and, again, containerization, on-premises customers can expect to retain and leverage their skills no matter where their data resides or moves (premises to cloud or even cloud to cloud). Of course, that only applies to the classics (NoSQL, Postgress, et al.); when it comes to Google BigQuery skills, those begin and end with Google.
About our survey: Now in its sixth iteration, our 2018 Global IT Customer Insight survey polled 3,249 IT professionals with buying power across all major company sizes, geographies, and vertical markets. Consisting of more than 27 questions, this survey seeks to understand past, current, and future buying priorities across a wide array of investment areas including data center virtualization, communications and collaboration, application development and management, mobility, networking, and IoT. Please visit GlobalData for more information and purchase options.
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