Organizations cannot rely on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to fulfil all their IT requirements: almost all companies develop their own custom apps. The majority of these apps, whether internal or internet-facing, currently run on datacenters owned or operated locally.

By the end of 2017 this will change — the majority of enterprise custom apps will reside in public clouds as the industry-wide migration to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) increases speed.