The trend involving databases being used for analytics under the ever-popular software as a service (SaaS) model will see 75% of all databases being deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, according to Gartner’s latest predictions.

The IT analyst house also said that just 5% of these will ever be considered by owners to be taken back into on-premise infrastructure as businesses continue to realise the benefits of widespread cloud adoption.

«According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,» said Donald Feinberg, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

«We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases — such as data warehousing, data lakes and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

«Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model.»

Research from Gartner shows that worldwide revenue from database management systems was up a significant 18.4% to $46 million and cloud database management systems accounted for 68% of that.

The company also notes that Microsoft and AWS account for more than 75% of the total market growth, indicating a trend towards cloud service providers becoming the new data management platform.

On-premise infrastructure rarely offers built-in capabilities to support cloud integration which is why its growth isn’t as vibrant as its cloud counterparts. The industry is growing, but at a much slower rate and not because of new on-premise deployments, but because of price increases and forced upgrades.

«Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured,» said Feinberg. «A recent Gartner cloud adoption survey showed that of those on the public cloud, 81% were using more than one CSP.

«The cloud ecosystem is expanding beyond the scope of a single CSP — to multiple CSPs — for most cloud consumers,» he added.

The UK is adopting the cloud more than others in the EU, according to figures from Eurostat published late last year.

A sixth-place ranking among EU countries for cloud adoption is primarily due to the high rate of British enterprises using some form of cloud service.

British businesses beat the average EU country in this regard by a significant margin, with 41.9% using at least one cloud service compared to the average of 26.2% – a figure beaten only by a handful of Scandinavian nations, Denmark, Sweden and Finland among them.