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It’s certainly implausible to think of businesses incorporating a ‘no internet’ policy at their place of work, even when the web was in an embryonic state. This will naturally extend to cloud policies at work, according to analyst house Gartner, who predicts that by 2020, a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be a thing of the past.

The analysts did not stop there, however, filling out a few more betting slips in the process. Gartner also predicts that by 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will be cloud-only, rather than cloud-first, while by 2020, more compute power will be sold by IaaS and PaaS providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centres.

Naturally, this prediction does not mean that cloud vs on premises will be entirely black and white. Gartner insists that not everything will be cloud-based, and with good reason; as this publication examined last week, some workloads will have difficulty in moving. Yet the idea that organisations have nothing in the cloud is the concept Gartner is targeting.

Jeffrey Mann, Gartner research vice president, argues many organisations who claim to be cloud-free will doubtless have a shadow IT influx anyway, exacerbating the problem. “We believe that this position will become increasingly untenable,” he said. “Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud.”

As a result, Gartner insists that hybrid is the way forward. “Enterprises and vendors need to focus on managing and leveraging the hybrid combination of on-premises, off-premises, cloud and non-cloud architectures, with a focus on managing cloud-delivered capacity efficiently and effectively,” said Thomas J. Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst.