Published on the 21/04/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Settle down about the cloud already. That’s the message coming from a Gartner A/NZ analyst who reckons local companies are a bit overly excited about the whole notion…

In a statement where he shared his thoughts on a number of trends, Sydney-based research director Michael Warrilow agreed that ‘cloud’ is a hot topic. “[But] many local organisations are getting a little too enthusiastic about it. Some are making dangerous assumptions that it will always save them money, which it’s not necessarily going to do.”

That’s a good point. I know from personal experience that one or two cloud services which cost just a few bucks can rapidly expand to plenty – and the 10s quickly add up to hundreds (yes I’m talking about you Netflix, iCloud, Office365, US IP address provider oops scratch that last one…).

At SMB or enterprise scale, cloud services can quickly add up to substantial opex amounts; the situation can also rapidly become its own bowl of spaghetti, difficult to keep track of (yes, there’s cloud vendors emerging to help with that problem too).

But back to Warrilow. “What they will get is more agility and a different mix of capex and opex, which the business likes.”

Stroll into many SMBs today and you are likely to still find significant amounts of tin. Not for much longer, he reckoned, pointing to the elimination of the ‘owned’ data centre as another trend gathering steam. “[That’s] really pronounced here compared with other markets like Europe and the United States. Concerns about supply and capacity have diminished, with cloud being seen as almost limitless and many commercial providers in the local market.

“Businesses don’t want to have all their capital tied up in data centre facilities, when they can be spending it in other areas. Instead, they’re using an increasing mix of co-location, hosting and cloud.”

Legacy modernisation is still an important issue in the antipodes, Warrilow added. “In Gartner’s 2016 CIO survey, Australian and New Zealand CIOs placed it as an equal priority to infrastructure and data centre. There’s still mainframe systems out there for really big workloads, particularly in government and banks. These businesses want to know how they can keep it in the fold and relevant, so modernisation is important. There are few alternatives at this point – it’s a captive market with organisations still spending serious money on it.”

Among the many attributes of mainframes, it seems, is their sheer tenacity – the things refuse to go away, despite greatly exaggerated predictions of their demise going back to at least the mid-late 1990s.

Finally, Warrilow shares his thoughts on private cloud, on which it seems the exuberant enthusiasm for ‘cloud’ is somewhat tempered. “Only a few short years ago, internal private cloud infrastructure would seem the likely evolution of server virtualisation in the data centre. However, successful adoption is being restricted by complexity, enterprise immaturity and the effort required, such that providers must plan carefully or risk over-investment,” he said.

“In fact, we are now at a point that Gartner survey data shows a decline in enterprises expecting internal private cloud to be their primary cloud deployment model. In contrast, hosted private cloud is expected to almost double as the primary model. Then there’s hybrid cloud, which also appears set for growth.”