The future of the database market is looking increasingly cloudy.

Analyst firm Gartner Inc. is predicting that three quarters of all database deployments will be made to the cloud within just three years, and that few will ever return to on-premises environments. The analyst firm, in a report published today, said the on-premises database market continues to fade as cloud-based options grow in popularity.

That’s thanks in part to the usefulness of databases that are used for analytics purposes as well as the rise of the cloud software-as-a-service business model. Gartner reckons that it’s seeing clients deploy new applications and migrate existing assets to the cloud at an exponentially growing rate.

Those deployments include things such as data warehouses and data lakes and also analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. And just 5% of these deployments are ever likely to be moved back in-house at a later date, it said.

The shift is part of the overall trend that’s seen companies increasingly move workloads away from their in-house information technology infrastructure to public cloud platforms rented from companies such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC. Cloud services can sometimes be more expensive, but they provide considerable advantages such as eliminating the need to manage the infrastructure, and being able to scale workloads up and down more easily. In many cases the cloud is also seen as more secure, Gartner said.

On-premises database systems such as those from Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and Microsoft are still growing at this time, but that momentum comes not from new deployments but rather forced upgrades that are undertaken to avoid risk, Gartner said. The vast majority of new deployments are instead made in the cloud.

Overall, worldwide database management system revenue grew in 2018 by 18.4%, to $46 billion, with cloud systems accounting for 68% of that growth, Gartner said. AWS and Microsoft were the biggest beneficiaries, accounting for 75.5% of all the cloud database growth.

“This trend reinforces that cloud service provider infrastructures and the services that run on them are becoming the new data management platform,” Gartner said.

The implications of that trend were revealed in June 23 blog post by Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal, who noted that virtually all of the innovation in the database management systems market is taking place in the cloud. As a result, anyone wanting to enjoy the benefits of the latest innovations had better be there.

“It is happening only there, or at the least, in the cloud first,” Ronthal said. “However, there is an increasing amount of innovation that will never get to on-premises, even when the vendor has on-premises products.”

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