Hybrid clouds increase but 'standalone' management is needed

Dive Brief:

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google will account for 80% of total cloud platform revenue by 2020, according to Forrester's cloud computing predictions for 2018. Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle are expected to share 70% of the SaaS market for sales automation and customer service subscription.
Cloud management tool offerings will continue to grow as "standalone modules" because bundling did not prove beneficial for vendors, according to the report. Public and private cloud providers are expected to include hybrid cloud management capabilities in their services including those for cost optimization, governance and monitoring.
To alleviate the dependence on management tools, Forrester suggests companies try a DevOps tool chain as well as infrastructure as code technologies, such as "configuration management automation." These services are meant to augment the free services cloud providers offer at a reduced cost.

Dive Insight:

About half of companies use more than one Infrastructure as a Service provider, with the most popular combination of public/public combinations belonging to AWS and Azure. The two companies remain the top two cloud vendors, but strategic partnerships across the market enable the stacking approach.

Forrester warns that managing multiple clouds is difficult but can be simplified through emerging hybrid stacks. Offerings such as Azure Stack and VMware Cloud on AWS are expected to increase.

The universal solution for managing data stored on multiple clouds is not something companies should hang their hopes on. Because a cloud management suite typically costs users more than its value, standalone solutions will increasingly emerge.

However, the hybrid cloud approach is one many companies still rely on. Azure Stack was developed to allow companies to supplement cloud-based resources with an on-premise server, and Forrester still recommends companies pursue stacking solutions for their convenience. The move to stacking will ultimately ease the transition to a full cloud management strategy.