An independent technology consultancy has warned digital transformation will soon collapse into digital disillusion.

6point6 Cloud Gateway managing director Justin Day says faith in the cloud will peak 2019 before slumping in 2020, before recovering in 2022 with better business analysis, more realistic expectations and a greater appreciation of hybrid cloud environments.

“Essentially, what we're witnessing – and I see evidence of it every day – is something like Gartner's Hype Cycle* in action, for the cloud. We're in the middle of a headlong rush to ‘full cloud' infrastructures, driven by digital evangelists who convince their leaders that it will all result in amazing business transformation and lower costs,” says Day.

“Their faith is absolute: we hear all too frequently that ‘everything must be in the cloud', but – equally frequently – we see insufficient objective assessment of what the actual business requirement is.

Day says that he believes within 12-18 months CEOs will begin to ‘feel the heat' from their boards, having placed all their bets on digital transformations that have failed to deliver on the promise.

“CFOs will be reporting that the cost savings they were expecting have failed to materialise – or, worse, that costs are higher because of the unexpected and to some extent uncontrollable costs. And, at some point between now and peak cloud, there will be a monstrous data loss of such epic proportions that it will force CISOs to concede that full cloud environments provide insufficient security, governance and control. There will be an overwhelming, crushing weight of doubt at senior levels,” says Day.

“The result will be a collapse in faith in the cloud as an amazing business panacea, which might last for two or three years. But eventually, digital moderates will be able to persuade their CEOs, CFOs and CISOs that, actually, better business analysis and hybrid cloud environments can and will give them the outcomes that they originally expected.

According to this Day, this faith collapse won't result in organizations taking a U-turn and returning to pre-cloud environments with solely on-premises data centers – they will just rein in sharply and take stock before adjusting their infrastructures and applications to meet better-analysed needs.

“It'll be an awkward and uncomfortable trough for those who advocated ‘full cloud'. But, because every organization will then adjust on its own timescale, it will constitute an opportunity for the likes of 6point6, which can help them to recover,” says Day.

“Meantime, we're focused on giving our customers the right, sometimes tough advice now, ensuring they take a steady approach to the cloud with proper analysis and execution.

* The Hype Cycle™ is a branded graphical presentation, developed and used by research, advisory and information technology firm Gartner, for representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. The hype cycle provides a graphical and conceptual presentation of the maturity of emerging technologies through five phases: technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity.