According to studies and research, majority of businesses are slated to migrate to the hybrid cloud environment within a few years time. According to surveys of IT executives carried out by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, there are many businesses which are seriously weighing their options to move operations to the cloud. So, the debate earlier on whether cloud hosting solutions are destined to stay or fade now holds no good. This is because most of the companies are actually shifting a huge portion of their IT workload to the cloud and the effects are likely to be huge for both technology vendors and consumers. There are reports that companies are planning to cut down the workload on the premises and many have sought to move the operations to a dedicated private cloud or public cloud infrastructure providers. So, the search for reputed and trustworthy cloud services provider is bound to increase in the near future.

The reason for this move to the cloud is not only because of costs. Instead IT people are of the opinion that the benefits in terms of time are perhaps the biggest reasons to shift to the cloud. At the same time, it was reported that compliance and data security were the primary threats which endangered cloud hosting and this is why companies were hesitant to adopt the cloud services. So, this made these two factors the key considerations whenever businesses had to choose cloud vendor.        

        

The bigger companies actually started adopting the cloud environment first and they moved much of their workloads to the virtualized platforms. The medium sized companies did also embrace cloud computing technologies but to a far lower extent. Most of the large companies included the banking institutions, insurance companies and healthcare institutions which faced a lot of pressure to make this transition. The IT executives belonging to the larger corporate are also planning to shift much of their workloads to the PaaS or IaaS environments in the next couple of years; they have plans to double their work in the private clouds. Most of the clients prefer public cloud services from Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure because these are tech giants with solid reputation. Amongst the businesses surveyed, nearly half had shifted at least a single workload to such providers and McKinsey expects the numbers to escalate by nearly 80%. Almost half of the leaders surveyed also stated that wanted to use traditional vendors and tier-three or tier-two providers for one remote operation. Since many companies lack IT staff with technical expertise to manage cloud services, they turn to managed cloud service providers.

This has a lot of significance for the IT vendors because those focusing on the on-premise environment will see their revenues fall because more and more businesses will turn to off-premise solutions. The vendors are aware that cloud hosting services will expand dramatically while traditional IT services will slow down. So, to stay in the race, the traditional distributors of IT services will have to consolidate with other companies and choose other opportunities like offering managed cloud services.

To conclude therefore, companies are likely to shift much of their operations to the hybrid cloud by 2018 according to reports by McKinsey and Company which conducted the above-mentioned surveys. The key reasons which triggered the emergence and popularity of cloud computing is the advantages cloud hosting offers in terms of quality and time. The IT vendors who sell to cloud vendors will witness a great rise in sales. Traditional IT companies will end up embracing the cloud technologies.