By Tony Asaro and Bruce Kornfeld
We recently hosted a webinar that examined the state of public cloud versus onsite IT in 2019. In this two-part blog series, we’ll highlight a few of the topics we tackled during the event. The link to listen to the replay on demand at your convenience is here.
Several headlines dominated the news in years past that predicted explosive growth of public cloud computing leading to the demise of onsite IT by now. But in fact, the US Department of Labor and Statistics recently reported that more than 557,000 IT jobs were created in 2018 alone, which is far above average job growth rates across all industries. So is public cloud or onsite IT winning the race today?
Some key findings and interesting trends we uncovered in researching this topic include:
- Public cloud (Iaas) revenue was $30 billion in 2017
- Gartner saw global IT spending reach $3.7 trillion in 2018 and predicts it will go to $3.8 trillion in 2019, which is the biggest jump since 2017
- Security is now a requisite in IT projects moving into 2019, further boosting budgets
- Top drivers of hardware, software, services purchases are driven by end of life of existing equipment, and upgrade / environment refreshes
When cloud first emerged, it created lots of hype. Many press, analysts and keynote speakers at industry conferences suggested that all data would be sent to the cloud and that IT jobs would be slashed.
Global economic expansion and digital transformation means that companies today have more budget for more IT projects—which must be backed by staff to build projects onsite and in some cases, migrate applications out to the cloud.
IT is becoming a more strategic division of businesses. As companies evaluate on-premises solutions versus outsourcing to the cloud, they must consider how to keep best practices intact. Some best practices are built on experience and changing requirements, and can take years to achieve, like meeting SLAs, regulatory compliance and other mandates. Because IT environments can take years to develop, it’s not simple to rip out and replace an established storage ecosystem. And handing over control to a cloud provider can interject new risks.
In part two of this blog series, we’ll discuss the tremendous growth of data happening outside of the datacenter and cloud at edge computing sites, and which scenarios are a better fit for public cloud over onsite. In the meantime, let’s continue the discussion on Twitter @TonyAsaroIO and @BruceKornfeld.
Tony Asaro is the CEO and Founder of the INI Group. Asaro has extensive experience and expertise on storage subsystems, NAS solutions, data management software and SAN infrastructure. Asaro has worked in the high tech industry for more than 30 years as a systems engineer, product manager, marketing and business development professional and analyst.
Bruce Kornfeld is an experienced technology executive who has held leadership roles at Compellent, Dell and NCR in marketing, alliances and business development in the storage, server, networking and software industries. He joined StorMagic in 2017 as CMO, and today serves as general manager of the Americas, where he is responsible for the Americas region sales and go-to-market strategy, as well as global strategic alliances and marketing.
