Analyst: Liam Eagle

Enterprise adoption of cloud infrastructure offerings and SaaS is accelerating, while the dominance of hyperscale providers is increasing in the public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud market. However, other service providers – including those with a history of providing managed hosting and operating infrastructure of their own – have a notable role to play in the cloud adoption process for the majority of enterprises and smaller businesses. That role is likely to include designing, managing and securing public cloud resources, as well as potentially supplementing them with private cloud resources of their own.

The nature of this role, and the degree of its significance, is supported and detailed in part by a study conducted in the first half of 2016 by 451 Research, and commissioned by Microsoft. In particular, the study results detail the nature of the cloud transformation taking place in the enterprise, and they offer insight into how service providers might take advantage of new opportunities emerging as a result. Understanding and acting on this fundamental shift will be extremely important for traditional hosting providers, as growth continues to dwindle in the core legacy facets of that business, such as shared and dedicated hosting.