Ah, to be a young startup with zero on-premises baggage, free to play the cloud-native field. Okay, stop daydreaming. Most companies have plenty of legacy applications they can’t kill and resurrect in cloud-native form. They have to figure out where to fit them on the long, winding continuum from legacy monolith to born-in-cloud.

“That’s really where the complication comes into play,” said Jason Gartner (pictured), vice president of worldwide hybrid cloud integration sales at IBM Corp.

Lifting and shifting legacy apps to cloud isn’t always satisfactory; sometimes modest gains in performance aren’t worth the trouble. Rebuilding them as cloud-native apps can be costly and not always feasible for highly regulated industries like banking, healthcare, insurance and government.

What are modernizing companies to do? Split apps into a high-performing cloud-native minority and a moss-and-ivy covered on-prem majority? Private cloud allows companies to modernize the apps that can’t go to public cloud, according to Gartner. They can keep apps secure and regulated on-prem — minus the greenery.

Gartner spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed how private cloud solves hybrid and transitional woes. (* Disclosure below.)

Kubernetes keeps it sexy on-prem

It is likely that just 20 percent of apps will live in the public cloud in the foreseeable future, according to Gartner. That would leave a staggering 80 percent on-prem and in need of modernizing. This is where private cloud can come in and make a killing.

“I think a lot of us underestimate how large that business really is,” Gartner said.

Aside from regulations and security, data residency is a cost-and-performance issue that might favor on-prem. “I can build all the applications I want in the cloud, but how do I get my data there?” Gartner asked.

IBM Cloud Private allows leverages containers (a virtualized method for running distributed apps) and container-orchestration platform Kubernetes. They give a modernizing “face lift” for legacy apps and enable hybrid portability. IBM’s enterprise-class services help users operate them efficiently, Gartner added.

“Cloud private provides you with all those services to be able to run those microservices as containers, but then be able to tie them together in a much more comprehensive enterprise suite,” Gartner concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE