As Cloud computing continues to chug along, Gartner forecasts 2016 to be a defining year for Cloud as private begins to give way to hybrid, making Cloud the bulk of new IT spend.

The analyst firm said in Australia, Cloud services revenue is projected to have a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.3 per cent from 2012 to 2017 across all segments of the market.

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Segments such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) have higher projected CAGR of 23.6 and 24.5 per cent, respectively.

"Cloud computing continues to grow at rates much higher than IT spending generally," Gartner research director, Ed Anderson, said. "Growth in Cloud services is being driven by new IT computing scenarios being deployed using Cloud models, as well as the migration of traditional IT services to Cloud service alternatives."

Gartner 'fellow', David Mitchell Smith, said, "Inherent dualities in the Cloud computing phenomenon are spawning divergent strategies for Cloud computing success. The public Cloud, hybrid Clouds and private Clouds now dot the landscape of IT-based solutions."

Smith also claims that while the majority of midsize and large enterprises will deploy private Cloud services over the next few years, it will only be used for specific services.

As a result, enterprises need to build their Cloud computing strategies by breaking down into two primary IT-centric work streams, two supporting IT work streams, and a strategic business work stream.

Gartner identifies the two primary work streams as: the enterprise as a consumer of Cloud services; the enterprise as a provider of Cloud services. When the enterprise is a consumer, the focus is on IT-related capabilities delivered as a service, whereas when the enterprise is a provider, this shifts to the hardware, software and processes used to implement a Cloud service.

The supporting enterprise work streams are securing, managing and governing Cloud services, and building solutions based on Cloud services. Gartner said there must be software, appliances or services in place to facilitate the consumption and use of Cloud service, where solutions may use any combination of infrastructure, platform, software, information or business process services.

The business work stream offers the opportunity to use Cloud delivery models to provide services to customers and business partners. According to Gartner, this represents an evolution of the enterprise's market-facing website and business-to-business (B2B) initiatives such as EDI.

"Using global-class thinking to address global-class problems, the focus should always be outward, not inward in adopting Cloud computing," Smith added.

"Adoption of Cloud computing happens in stages. The types of applications and workloads to be moved can indicate which stage of adoption is most appropriate."

(By Nermin Bajric)