Originally published January 2017. Source: cio.com, citing Forrester Research analysis by analyst Dave Bartoletti.
Cloud computing had already transformed many enterprises in the years before 2017, but analysts at Forrester Research argued the market was entering a meaningful second wave — one driven not by startups and early adopters, but by large enterprises migrating core business workloads. Forrester predicted the cloud market would accelerate significantly in 2017 as organizations sought compute efficiency at scale.
“The No. 1 trend is here come the enterprises,” said Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, primary author of the research. “Enterprises with big budgets, data centers and complex applications are now looking at cloud as a viable place to run core business applications.”
Forrester surveyed more than 1,000 North American and European enterprise infrastructure technology decision-makers and found:
- 38% were actively building private clouds.
- 32% were procuring public cloud services.
- The remainder planned to implement some form of cloud in the next 12 months.
- 59% said they were adopting a hybrid cloud model.
Based on this research, Forrester offered six cloud predictions for 2017. Each remains instructive for understanding how enterprise cloud strategy has evolved.
1. Regional Cloud Players Complement Mega-Providers
Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 with a handful of simple compute and storage services. By 2017, AWS was operating at an $11 billion annual run rate. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM joined AWS as what Bartoletti termed “mega-cloud providers,” opening new data centers around the world and making regulatory concessions — such as Microsoft’s agreement to have T-Systems manage its cloud infrastructure in Germany to comply with data localisation requirements.
Despite their scale, these providers cannot address every regional compliance requirement, latency constraint or industry-specific need. Forrester predicted smaller regional cloud providers would see increased adoption in 2017 as a result. The practical guidance from Bartoletti: “Keep your options open and don’t be afraid to use multiple providers.”
This prediction proved accurate. Multi-cloud strategy became a dominant enterprise architecture pattern in the years that followed, driven by exactly the factors Forrester identified: regulatory complexity, data sovereignty and the limitations of any single vendor’s footprint.
Capital One’s public shift away from private cloud to AWS illustrated the broader enterprise momentum. CIO Rob Alexander explained the rationale: “We recognised that we were spending a lot of time, energy, effort and management bandwidth to create infrastructure that already exists out there in a much better state and is evolving at a furious pace.”
2. Cloud Cost Containment Becomes a Core Discipline
A common assumption in 2017 was that moving to public cloud automatically reduced IT costs. Forrester challenged this. CIOs managing multiple cloud providers faced increasingly complex vendor relationships, and poorly managed cloud consumption — such as leaving instances running over weekends when not needed — could result in spending more than an equivalent on-premises deployment.
Forrester predicted that IT organisations would mature their cost management practices in 2017. As a concrete example, Bartoletti cited a cloud architect at a large software company who reduced a $2.5 million annual cloud bill by $300,000 simply through consumption monitoring.
Cost management tooling from providers including AWS, Cloudability and Cloudyn was already available at the time. Bartoletti was direct: “There’s no reason in 2017 for your cloud costs to grow out of control.”
Cloud financial management — now commonly called FinOps — has since become its own engineering discipline, validating this prediction entirely.
3. Lift-and-Shift Migration Tools Accelerate Cloud Adoption
The ideal approach to cloud migration has always been to refactor or re-architect applications to take full advantage of cloud-native capabilities such as elasticity, managed services and auto-scaling. However, re-architecting is expensive and time-consuming — often impractical for large application portfolios.
Forrester predicted that lift-and-shift migration tools — which move existing applications to the cloud with minimal or no code changes — would lower the barrier to bulk application migrations in 2017. The trade-off is well understood: lift-and-shift gets workloads into the cloud quickly and cheaply, but organisations typically leave cloud-native efficiency gains on the table until they refactor later.
As Bartoletti put it: “In 2017, lift-and-shift migration tools will accelerate the rate of cloud migration, given their low cost for bulk application migrations.”
4. Hyperconverged Infrastructure Becomes the Private Cloud Foundation
Not every enterprise CIO was ready to move sensitive data to a third-party public cloud provider. For organisations committed to private cloud, building a capable, self-service infrastructure required advanced virtualisation, automation, standardisation and resource monitoring — capabilities that were difficult and expensive to assemble from discrete components.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offered a compelling alternative: pre-integrated compute and storage resources in a single appliance or software-defined platform, designed to simplify private cloud deployment and reduce time to value. Forrester recommended HCI as the default foundation for private cloud builds, particularly for workloads requiring rapid, automated scale-out.
“HCI is quickly becoming the default infrastructure platform upon which to build the private portion of a hybrid cloud,” Bartoletti said.
Vendors such as Nutanix, VMware and Dell EMC drove significant HCI adoption in the years following this prediction, confirming the trend.
5. Containers Reach Every Major Cloud Platform
Containers — most prominently Docker — had been gaining developer adoption for several years by 2017. Forrester predicted that Linux containers would be available across every major public and private cloud platform by early 2017, moving from developer experimentation into production workloads at scale.
The adoption of containers brought new operational challenges, including security hardening, persistent storage, networking between containers, and production monitoring. Forrester advised organisations to carefully evaluate on-premises private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options against managed public cloud development platforms before committing to a container strategy — noting that some organisations would need both.
Kubernetes, which Google open-sourced in 2014, was already emerging as the leading container orchestration system by 2017, and its subsequent dominance validated Forrester’s focus on containers as a defining trend of the era.
6. Enterprise Applications Move to Public Cloud
Perhaps the most significant signal of cloud maturity in 2017 was the willingness of large enterprises to run mission-critical business applications in the public cloud. Examples cited in the original Forrester research included:
- Dollar Shave Club running Apache Spark analytics workloads on AWS.
- Cardinal Health running Splunk on AWS.
- Multiple enterprises running SAP on AWS.
These examples represented a meaningful shift in CIO risk tolerance. Where earlier cloud adoption had focused on development environments, test workloads and commodity infrastructure, enterprises were now entrusting revenue-generating and compliance-sensitive applications to public cloud providers.
“Enterprises are turning great ideas into software and insights faster and the cloud is the best place to get quick insights out of enterprise data,” Bartoletti concluded.
Key Takeaways
Viewed from the present, Forrester’s 2017 predictions were largely accurate. Enterprise cloud adoption accelerated, multi-cloud became standard, FinOps emerged as a discipline, HCI grew rapidly, Kubernetes achieved dominance in the container space, and public cloud is now the default platform for enterprise application development. The six trends below summarise the framework:
- Regional players complement mega-providers — Multi-cloud and regional compliance requirements drive vendor diversity.
- Cloud cost containment — Consumption monitoring and FinOps practices become essential.
- Lift-and-shift migration — Tooling lowers the barrier to bulk migrations even without refactoring.
- Hyperconverged infrastructure — HCI simplifies private cloud builds within hybrid architectures.
- Containers — Linux containers reach every major platform, introducing new operational challenges.
- Enterprise apps on public cloud — CIOs grow comfortable running core business applications outside the data centre.
Original reporting by cio.com, based on Forrester Research analysis by Dave Bartoletti.