Hyperscale cloud providers are increasingly dominating the cloud sector, with research from Gartner finding this dominance is starting to affect other, smaller providers of cloud infrastructure.
Some believe this highlights a clear trend that privately managed infrastructure will increasingly become transient or for niche purposes only.
But not everyone agrees.
"As cloud services mature and a new generation of highly capable and easy-to-use private clouds emerge, we are seeing informed customers that are expecting to consume services from both private clouds as well as multiple public clouds," says Dr Jai Menon, chief scientist at Cloudistics.
"Every public cloud vendor, including AWS [Amazon Web Services], has been forced to react to this new customer reality.
"We have witnessed the 'rush to the cloud' where the hype of cloud seemingly overwhelmed rational consideration. As organisations took stock of operational impacts of running services in the cloud, particularly around security, performance and costs, people began to realise that certain applications may not be best suited to running in the cloud."
According to Menon, the majority of application services will continue to be delivered from private clouds, and public cloud providers should offer more utilities or integration points to enable easier movement of application services and data between public and private clouds.
"Customers running multiple clouds will expect tools and utilities to provide cross-cloud mobility."
Speaking of how he envisages cloud to evolve over the next few years, Menon says Cloudistics expects to see growing opportunities for software and services supporting cross-cloud operations, including areas such as federated orchestration, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery.
Menon will speak at ITWeb Cloud Summit 2019, to be held on 12 February, at The Forum in Bryanston.
During his talk, entitled "The future of cloud is clear, and it's not what you think", he will explore the adoption of cloud services and how the initial predictions of mass migration of workloads to public cloud, AWS in particular, are proving to be overblown.
"We will close the session with an intriguing set of predictions on the evolution of cloud over the next few years," he concludes.
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