Companies’ applications are increasingly disaggregated and will become even more fluid in the near future with workloads and data moving between clouds, data centers, and edge environments based on business priorities, according to an IDC report sponsored by Cisco. And this inherently leads to more complexity.

IDC surveyed 2,200 organizations across industries and around the globe about how they use cloud computing in their IT portfolio now, and how they expect to do so in two years. It found that almost all companies (92%) have both public and private clouds, and 88% do business with two or more cloud services providers — but the average number is 16.

These companies are also using new platforms and development tools like containers and microservices to build applications, and those surveyed expect a 50% increase in the number of applications they develop over the next two years.

“As much as the 50% growth looks big, the amount of change under the surface may be even bigger,” said Kip Compton, SVP of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions group, in an interview with SDxCentral. The survey also found only half of all applications are expected to stay in place over the next year. “We put the two together — it’s an incredibly dynamic environment.”

This high application churn — application migrations, new builds, rewrites, and decommissions — requires fluidity and a high level of interoperability of data and applications between environments.

While each business applications already has between four and eight other application dependencies currently, the survey found 51% of organizations expect high application interdependencies in two years. That’s up from 21% today. Also in two years: 47% of applications will be built using modular development frameworks such as microservices compared to about 30% now.

This is great for developers, Compton said. But this shifting, disaggregated application portfolio also means more complexity in how to manage applications.

“For the developers that basically means they’re breaking their applications into more little pieces, which means those little pieces can get reused like interchangeable parts,” said Compton, who also posted a blog about the IDC report. “But the challenge is how you actually operationalize that and orchestrate all those little pieces. [It] creates new complexity.”

This means cloud architects and application developers need to consider new lifecycle management approaches and governance models that best fit their organizations’ requirements for things like performance, risk management, and agility. And it will require developers, IT operations teams, security professionals, lines of business, and executives to work together using standardized processes and workflows — more of a DevOps approach across the enterprise.

“What we’ve seen on the organizational side is actually a trend toward more sort of cross functional capabilities and more collaborative organizational structures being used to tackle the complexity,” Compton said. “What would traditionally be separate silos within an enterprise are able to cut through the complexity. … The most successful customers we’re seeing are ones that are able to develop a very collaborative, or even integrated approach between these different stakeholders.”