The need for digital transformation is compelling enterprises to move from traditional data warehouses to the cloud. Gartner estimates that the worldwide public cloud services market will increase by over 17 percent to $206 billion in 2019. IDC forecasts the global spending on cloud services and infrastructure to reach $210 billion in 2019. These estimates highlight the increasing adoption of intelligent cloud-based technologies.
However, not all businesses can move to the public cloud, which offers more of ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions. Enterprises invested in on-premise infrastructure and business models cannot simply discard their entire model and move to the cloud. Therefore, enterprises looking to combine the best of both worlds are adopting hybrid cloud, which is a combination of private, public, and on-premise, allowing more flexibility and data deployment options for enterprise workloads.
The hybrid cloud market is emerging. The RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report reveals that 84 percent of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy (vs. 81 percent in 2018), while 58 percent (up from 51 percent in 2018) enterprises have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of enterprises will adopt a hybrid cloud, which leverages the existing infrastructure investments and technologies and combines them with flexible and expandable cloud resources.
Realizing the trend, Microsoft has enabled cloud services like Azure to work with on-premise solutions for enterprises to transform ETL workloads from legacy data warehouses to the cloud.