Cloud adopters face serious risk in the next two years because of the strong possibility that their provider will be acquired or forced out of business, according to Gartner.
The research firm is predicting a major consolidation in cloud services and estimates that about 25% of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won’t be around by 2015. “One in four vendors will be gone for whatever reason — acquisition, bankruptcy,” said William Maurer, a Gartner analyst. Most of the time, the changes will come through acquisition.
Concerns about risks may drive some users to large vendors, Salvador said, but smaller providers may offer better prices or some additional guarantee that a large provider may not offer. There is pressure on providers to cut costs, but Maurer told his audience to be gentle with their vendors.
“You need to make to make sure that your service providers are successful,” said Maurer. “Give them a chance to make a reasonable return on their investments, give them a chance to make some money. Don’t take all the money off the table, because if you do, you are not going to have a lot of them around.”
Nearly 50% saw cloud-based solutions as having “a great deal of risk” while 33% saw “somewhat” risk. Only 12% indicated there was little risk. Gartner also predicts that the portion of organizations using cloud services will reach 80% by the end of this year.
