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The report, Competing in the clouds: emerging strategies for enterprise data centres, demonstrates that Private Cloud will be the fastest growing segment in the enterprise market. However, migrating to cloud services represents a new way of operating, and will require a change in mindset by enterprise IT leaders because ‘IT as a Service’ introduces very different business and operational models.

The report suggests that in the short term, most companies will be able to cope with growing data demands using their existing infrastructure. However as enterprises are confronted by the priority to upgrade or migrate to Private Cloud to secure greater business agility plus continued strong growth in data volumes will mean that data centres will be the principal beneficiary of the migration, with space doubling from its current level over the next five years.

“The signs are that a complex and interesting market structure will evolve over time,” commented Marion Howard Healy, the report author and a Senior Consultant at BroadGroup. “A significantly higher proportion of enterprise data centre space will be outsourced by 2015. In our view this could be as much as 35% by 2015.”

BroadGroup believes that Hybrid clouds will evolve as the next big opportunity and that by 2020, for the majority of enterprises, as little as 10% of applications will remain in private clouds. These applications will be core or critical to the business. Non-critical applications will be provisioned via public cloud services or via virtual private clouds on public service infrastructures. There will be exceptions particularly in finance and central government sectors.

The report represents the most comprehensive assessment yet of how Private Cloud will interact with enterprises and data centre outsourcing. Because cloud market development is “kaleidoscopic” there is much in play, and much to play for in short and medium term investment and IT decisions.