OREANDA-NEWS. January 15, 2016. In this third in a series of blogs about IDC’s recent “FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions-Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation” report, we move from cloud disruption and management to cloud-driven IT transformation. Here are some of the report’s predictions about the future of IT.

IDC Cloud Prediction #6: Diversified IT – By 2018, 65% of Firms’ IT Assets Will Be Offsite in Colocation, Hosting and Cloud Data Centers, While One-Third of IT Staff Will Be Those of Third-Party Service Providers

Our take: Diversified IT will be the name of the game as organizations turn to cloud and colocation service providers for the points of presence, optimized infrastructure and expertise they need to rapidly build and scale systems of engagement and insight. IT will leverage a range of on-premises and off-premises deployment models and a broad portfolio of SaaS and IaaS cloud services and expertise.

As a result, IT’s role will shift to administration and orchestration of internal and third-party assets — increasingly co-managed with third-party providers. This represents an implementation of the diversified IT operation and governance models that accommodate external providers and their expertise. Internal assets will inevitably become software-defined as services are increasingly abstracted from physical assets. IT will have to develop best practices for service provider selection, governance and management to compete in this brave new world.

IDC Cloud Prediction #9: Skills and Staffing – By 2017, There Will Be a 9% Shift of IT Budget Away from In-House IT Delivery as More Third-Party Service Providers Are Used to Fill Cloud-Related Skills Gaps

Our take: Internal IT operations staff will fall 10% as workloads move to the cloud, while developers with expertise in model-driven and deployment-centric frameworks, mobile and commercial code development, declarative code frameworks, and integrated PaaS development and deployment will be in high demand. IT will increasingly turn to third parties for both IT-related skill sets — such as container, agile and DevOps strategies — and business skill sets, such as compliance and cloud service management. Professional providers will turn to crowdsourcing to meet varied customer cloud-related demands. Organizations will have to decide what to entrust to third parties, and IT will need to become skilled in choosing and working with providers that understand the importance of agility, analytics, mobility and social technology, rather than simply delivering IT at a low cost.

IDC Cloud Prediction #10: By 2018, 25% of Global Enterprises Will Have Service Providers from Asia-Pacific as Part of Their Cloud Ecosystem

Our take: Though they’ve been running behind Western businesses until recently, Asian organizations are poised to accelerate the move to cloud delivery models. The result will be the rapid development of a significant cloud ecosystem in Asia-Pacific. By 2018, 25% of cloud operators in the enterprise cloud ecosystem will be Asia-based. Western cloud providers will form regional data center partnerships with local tier 1 and 2 telcos. Local Asian players will gain market share for IaaS while global majors gain share in PaaS and SaaS for systems of engagement. Organizations should start now building an Asian expansion strategy that meets data residency and local compliance requirements.

Equinix can help IT organizations navigate these changes with more than 700 colocated IT services and systems integrators as well as 21 Equinix data centers in Asia-Pacific. Equinix also offers its own cloud consulting professional services organization. For those enterprises seeking outside IT services, Equinix is the right place to look. And for IT services companies seeking a home, Equinix houses more than 6,250 potential partner or customer companies.

The next and final blog in this series will focus on how cloud-based analytics is accelerating public information consumption and paving the way for thousands of new industry applications.