The database market continues to shift to the cloud – and according to Gartner, three quarters of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022.

The finding, which appears in the analyst firm’s latest report, ‘The Future of the DBMS Market is Cloud’, revealed how artificial intelligence was influencing the need for greater data usage. Only 5% of databases will be cloudless by 2022, Gartner added, being considered for ‘repatriation’ to on-premises environments.

Last year, global database management system (DBMS) revenue grew 18.4% to $46 billion (£36.4bn), according to Gartner’s figures. Growth in on-premises systems, the company added, was not down to long term strategy; instead, price increases and forced upgrades are undertaken to mitigate risk.

“According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,” said Donald Feinberg, Gartner distinguished research vice president. “We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases – such as data warehousing, data lakes, and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model,” Feinberg added.

Of total DMBS revenue growth, cloud database management systems accounted for more than two thirds (68%) of it. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gartner added, accounted for more than three quarters of that. This gives rise to another trend – that cloud service provider infrastructure is becoming de facto data management platforms.

This is again linked back to multi-cloud, and organisations having to reinforce their strategies due to complex implementations. Gartner recently found that, of respondents who were on the public cloud, more than four in five (81%) were using more than one service provider. “Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured,” added Feinberg.

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