By 2018, enterprises willoutsource nearly 70% of their IT infrastructure for cost savings, in-house skills shortages and a growing emphasis on business advancing applications.
These findings are based on Vanson Bourne's latest research, titled "Global IT Trends: IT Outsourcing Fuels Business Growth," commissioned by Savvis, a US-based provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions and a Century Link company.
From in-house environments to outsourced cloud
This study projects a reversal to today's situation, in which 65% of IT infrastructure resides in in-house environments, and suggests most organizations will arrive at outsourced cloud through hybrid approaches to colocation and managed-service models.
"The next five years will bring a dramatic shift in the way organizations approach IT," said Jeff Von Deylen, president, Savvis. "Clearly, cloud is part of the picture but it's not the whole picture. As businesses grow and move more IT infrastructure to outsourcing providers, they will adopt a strategic mix of colocation, managed-hosting and cloud services."
The Savvis-Vanson Bourne survey was conducted on 550 IT decision makers in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. In its fifth year, the study offers global insight from key industries on trends in IT outsourcing, adoption of cloud solutions and the costs of owning infrastructure.
Infrastructure hybrid shift
The study finds that though in-house IT infrastructure models lead in popularity today, by percentage of infrastructure, the near future brings a hybrid shift. As colocation becomes the environment of choice in two years, managed services take the lead in five years and cloud eclipses all forms shortly thereafter.
This hybrid shift correlates with IT leader expectations for outsourcing partners: Nearly 70% of respondents agree their IT service provider needs to have a range of offerings to meet requirements at all stages of the buying and application lifecycle, and more than 65% agree an optimal cloud provider should own the underlying network.
Responses from IT leaders indicate their organizations will see revenues climb an average of 8.5% this year and an average of 11.5% next year. Companies predicting higher growth rates tend to have a majority of their IT in in-house private cloud, colocation or managed hosting environments
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