Gartner is fully in the cloud. Are you?

As many of you know, Gartner is recognized as one of the premier analyst firms by most enterprise IT organizations. Given the broad and diverse set of customers Gartner serves -- many risk averse and conservative towards new technologies, Gartner generally tends to recommend incremental and measured changes.

Imagine our surprise when Gartner made this very bold statement "on-premises is the new legacy. Cloud is the future." Gartner made this statement in the context of a new blog proclaiming the arrival of cloud-based database systems.

What is really interesting about the Gartner statement is that it pertains to databases -- the heart and soul of all applications. It goes without saying -- if your database is in the cloud, your application needs to be in the cloud. The blog highlights database adoption trends and discusses the following points:

• More and more end-user organizations are deploying systems and applications to the cloud, including replacing on-premises systems with SaaS
• Organizations who want to take advantage of new innovation in DBMS are moving to the cloud
• New pricing models, avoidance of capital expense in favor of operating expense, and leveraging a pay-as-you-go approach, seem to be driving the move to the cloud

At Sumo Logic, this Gartner commentary is music to our ears. After all, as a cloud-native solution and serving thousands of cloud-based customers, we have seen cloud to be a true catalyst for innovation, agility, cost optimization, standardization, and much more.

To add to Gartner’s data, let me point to a few more database adoption data points. This chart is from Sumo Logic’s State of Modern Application and DevSecOps report (2018 edition) and reflects cloud database systems adoption trends from leading cloud-based organizations such as AirBnb, Twitter, Epic Games, Samsung Smartthings, and more.

How should you use this data?

• Realize cloud architecture could radically affect your database system choices.
• Enterprises have many choices for databases — open source, commercial, relational, NoSQL, in-memory, disk-based, etc.
• If you buy into Gartner’s recommendation that your database system needs to be in the cloud, prioritize evaluating some of the leading vendors from the Sumo Logic report.