Lifting and shifting workloads to the public cloud often doesn’t deliver a solid return on investment. Instead, CIOs should zero in on consolidating their applications. Philip Dawson from Gartner emphasized this in a recent podcast with Computer Weekly. He highlighted the importance of clearing out outdated systems.
At the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, Dawson discussed the future of IT infrastructure and stressed effective cloud management. As IT environments get more complex, he urged IT leaders to rationalize or eliminate unnecessary applications. “Ditch the dead wood and modernize only what’s essential,” he advised. He pointed out that if an application adds little business value and has high complexity, it’s just a drain on resources.
This principle also holds in the cloud. Many organizations move applications to the public cloud without optimizing them for the cloud’s capabilities. A distributed hybrid infrastructure is where the real advantages lie. It combines key cloud-native features—like programmability and elasticity—and can be managed from anywhere, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
Dawson noted that modernizing applications generally works better on-premise than in the cloud. He identified key players in the on-premise to cloud space: IBM with IBM Cloud, Nutanix with its Cloud Platforms, and VMware offering solutions like Azure VMware Solution and Google Cloud VMware Engine.
He also mentioned Red Hat, now part of IBM, positioning its OpenShift platform for virtual machines and containers. While Red Hat’s approach targets application modernization, tangible benefits only arise when applications undergo serious refactoring. Dawson stressed that simply moving a workload to a “fat container” doesn’t lead to the efficiencies that IT departments seek. Transitioning to containerization demands significant reworking of applications.
He pointed out that while there’s an ambition to containerize a chunk of new applications, a significant portion—around two-thirds—of existing systems, particularly legacy ones, still need modernization.
Ultimately, IT departments will likely face a mix of private and public cloud environments along with various cloud-native setups. Data center providers are selling equipment on a pay-per-use model, and major players like Alibaba, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle, and TencentCloud are all providing capabilities that bridge on-premise and public cloud.
Dawson concluded that with this mix, IT leaders need to be strategic about which applications to refactor, which to move to the cloud, and which to retire altogether.