An overwhelming 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020, according to the latest prognostication from analyst firm Gartner.

The forecast, which appears in a new report titled ‘Predicts 2017: Infrastructure Services Become Hybrid Infrastructure Services’, notes the duel forces of cloud and industrialised services growth and the decline of traditional data centre outsourcing as the primary factors.

Gartner argues that last year, traditional worldwide data centre outsourcing, alongside infrastructure utility services (IUS), represented 49% of the global data centre services market, priced at $154 billion. By 2020, the numbers will swell to $228bn, but the charge towards cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hosting will see the traditional base fall to 35%. Observant readers will note that the size of the market will increase – $75.46bn last year compared with $79.8bn in 2020 – but like on-prem versus cloud-based enterprise collaboration, it is an inexorable shift.

“As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organisations will shift toward more industrialised, less tailored options,” said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner in a statement. “Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.”

Maarten van Montfoort, VP north-west Europe at IT provider Comparex, makes a similar argument, noting the importance of avoiding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ migration. “Many company’s existing infrastructure are currently designed for ‘business as usual’ operations with a combination of dated licensing models not designed for cloud and a lack of application compatibility,” he said.

“Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model, and each organisation’s journey will be different,” added van Montfoort. “For example: can legacy, business-critical applications – not built with cloud in mind – be re-architected for the cloud, or do they need to stay on premise? Should the organisation be seeking out a new SaaS product to fit their needs? And does the organisation have the specific skills in-house that it will need to do this?

“These are all important considerations if organisations are to maximise the ROI of hybrid cloud.”