As IDC Sees It, Tech's 'Third Platform' Disrupts Everyone

More important is what this means for private cloud prospects. Clearly implied in this prediction is that a significant amount of IT spending - perhaps even a majority, when software development costs are added to server spending - will be directed toward public cloud computing environments. If you're an IT manager or individual contributor hanging your hat on your company's internal cloud, well, then IDC believes your career prospects are limited.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I commonly talk with both vendors and IT organizations who confidently state that public cloud computing adoption will tail off as people begin to realize issues with data privacy and security. The feeling is something along the lines of, "Public cloud computing got a good start while we were sorting things out, but now that we've figured it out, things will shift in our direction."

I'm not so sure. Often accompanying these "workloads will come back to us" pronouncements is a conviction that public cloud environments have mostly been used for testing, developments and applications that are relatively unimportant - that is, experiments and small-scale early-stage projects. This is associated with a belief that most public cloud use is by startups and small businesses.

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From my experience, this perspective vastly underestimates and misinterprets what's actually being done in public cloud environments. There are important, large, enterprise production applications being run in public cloud environments, with more being deployed every day. Given the IT reality that, once deployed, applications are rarely re-hosted, this means that public cloud computing will undoubtedly have a strong future. IDC, at least, believes that public cloud computing will be the dominant platform going forward.