So Gartner has predicted that within the next 2 years 20% of all IT shops will have switched off the lights and moved IT operations to the Cloud (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413). I, like many in the Industry find this timescale pretty fanciful. This isn’t because  there will be insufficient variety of “AASes” on the market to satisfy demand, every day new ventures are being released or rebranded as Cloud offerings. Nor do I believe that the “under-whelmed users” ( http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1062512) will stop the migration.

No. The reason I don’t believe this will come to pass has nothing to do with the future and everything to do with the past.

Very few organisations are without the suite of  servers that sit in the corner running old legacy applications for the event of users needing to get hold of historic data. The fact that some cannot even be connected to the internet rules out running the systems in cloud and for those that can even if a service provider was prepared to provide the skills and hardware, the setup costs would be so prohibitive to the value of the data that the business case wont stack up.

The good news for our customers is that we provide an application retirement service that retains data availability independent of the original application. With a typical payback within the year many see it as a  cost effective way to release IT funds.

The good news for Gartner is we can provide this as a Cloud service, (or  in-house for the other 80%)

 
The Bad news? With the best will in the world I can’t see us getting to 20% of Global IT shops by 2012