Preparing for Your Migration to the Cloud

Introduction

The cloud is everywhere.

You know that the cloud stats are trending up, but did you know how fast? According to Forrester, the global public cloud market will jump from $146 billion in 2017 to $178 billion in 2018. After that, it is expected to grow at a 22-percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

For comparison purposes, growth of the overall global tech sector in 2018 will be just five percent, and even if it smashed predictions it would get only to the seven-percent-plus range. Thus, an increasing proportion of global information technology spending will be on the cloud. (According to IDC, global information technology spending will reach $4.8 trillion in 2018.)

Not surprisingly, the cloud migration market is heating up, as well. After all, these businesses investing in cloud technology generally need services to help them succeed in their transformations. The global cloud migration services market is predicted to expand from $3.17 billion in 2017 to $9.47 billion by 2022, at an even higher CAGR of 24.5 percent.

Most notable about all this is the move to the public cloud. According to McKinsey, almost 80 percent of businesses plan to have more than 10 percent of their workloads in the public cloud within three years. According to Spiceworks, these workloads range from backup (the most popular), to email hosting, to productivity apps, and everything in between (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Budget breakdown of cloud ...