For offshore service providers, analyst house Gartner has provided a warning shot: ensure you’ve got a strategy to the cloud mapped out, otherwise your long term future will be at risk.

With public cloud services gradually gaining acceptance in the marketplace – the analyst house predicts the public cloud market will hit $180bn by 2015 – this represents something of an upswing.

This is all powered by Gartner’s influential ‘nexus of forces’ template, with cloud, mobile, social and information expected to drive business and IT for years to come.

Yet whilst Gartner advocates adopting cloud to keep up in the services industry, it’s not ‘make or break’.

“Cloud-based services will not replace offshore services, but will complement them,” Ian Marriott, Gartner research VP said.

“There will always be a need for ‘pure-play’ providers that operate a labour-intensive delivery approach. But for broad-based offshore providers that operate in multiple geographies …