LAS VEGAS, NV – The cloud has no plans of slowing down, but organizations need to remain realistic about what it can offer them.

According to Gartner, more than half of enterprises today agree cloud is indispensable or heavily impactful. And by 2027, that figure is expected to rise to more than 90%, although 40% of enterprises will be working toward unachievable multicloud expectations.

The multicloud adoption process can be separated into three phases: tactical use of multiple clouds out of necessity, acceptance that multicloud architectures are the reality, and leveraging multiple cloud providers with an “architectural approach and really trying to do portability, dynamic provisioning, or things like cloud bursting and availability, which tends to be a real problem,” Analyst David Smith said during Gartner's infrastructure and operations (I&O) cloud strategies conference.

“The expectations people have of multicloud are not going to be achievable for the most part,” he said, citing the firm's prediction that leverage availability will decrease. “People are going to realize that doesn't really work. The reason is, if you are looking for high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity, it is far easier to get that kind of capability” within a single vendor's ecosystem. “Try to do that across ecosystems – that's very difficult.”

To that point, multicloud and cloud native are two of the most abused and misunderstood terms, Smith said. They're also the two biggest topics he hears about from industry clients.

Gartner expects that by 2027, “70% of the requirements customers have for what they call cloud native are going to be delivered by the ecosystems around the cloud service provider [CSP] – primarily the hyperscalers – and we use this term CSP native to refer to things that work just on that cloud service provider” as opposed to container native, he explained.

Gartner projects the public cloud services market will “pop $1 trillion in 2026,” Smith said. That growth will happen with the division of cloud services into core technology, capability enhancers, and value enhancers.

Core cloud technology developed and influenced by hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud is built upon through the capabilities and value enhancement layers. Value enhancers utilize the technology core and the capabilities enhancement layers to provide services used directly by the users.

AWS, for example, “can choose to focus a little bit more on the capability enhancement and get out of the business of the technology core,” Smith said. “These are some of the things that you're going to be wanting to see and watch for in the vendor area.”