Enterprise IT and the public cloud: What the numbers tell us

The spectacular growth of the public cloud has many drivers, only one of which is the deployment, redevelopment or migration of enterprise IT into the cloud. But many in the industry — data center builders and operators, hardware and software suppliers, networking companies, and providers of skills and services alike — are closely watching the rate at which enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud, and for good reason: Enterprise IT is a proven, high-margin source of revenue, supported by large, reliable budgets. Attracting — or keeping — enterprise IT business is critical to the existing IT ecosystem.

The popular view is that enterprise IT is steadily migrating to the public cloud, with the infrastructure layers being outsourced to cheaper, more reliable, more flexible, pay-as-you-go cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google are the biggest beneficiaries. It is frequently forecast that we will reach a tipping point where non-public cloud or non-software as a service (SaaS) IT becomes prohibitively expensive, less efficient and too difficult to support.