General Cloud Computing Trends in 2012

–      Security is the number-one cloud quality of service (QoS) concern.

–      Demand for anytime, on-the-go accessibility will be a major force in shaping cloud computing.

• Ubiquity of influential mobile devices and cheap bandwidth, coupled with today’s “Agile” business environment, means that the demand for accessibility will continue to drive cloud adoption.

–      Integrated “stack-as-a-service” delivery models is expected to grow.

–      Better consolidation of cloud providers to achieve economies of scale

–      A lack of staff skills to support a private cloud implementation

–      Analytics is moving to the cloud at a faster pace than we expected, but mainly in the private cloud for large enterprises. Analytics requires voluminous data movement, which is an Achilles’ heel for public clouds.

–      Many gaps in vertical offerings for cloud apps in industries like education and healthcare and gaps

–      Cloud computing grows slowly but surely and keeps IT on its toes

–      U.S. government agencies moved at least one workflow to the cloud following the new requirement that U.S. federal agencies adopt a “cloud-first” policy

–      Data security concerns do not change significantly after adopting cloud computing

–      Nearly all businesses boost improvements in IT performance after cloud adoption

–      Information access to multiple computing devices is the top driver

–      Existing Storage Continues to Be Used: the notion of moving all their data to the cloud is not feasible.

–      Disaster Recovery to Cloud Becomes a Viable Option

–      DR From the Cloud May Become a Requirement-a new breed of solutions that backup SaaS data either locally or to an alternate provider.

–      Certain business application can be moved entirely to the cloud, saving the administration and maintenance of their hardware/software platforms on-site. Businesses are looking for tools to make this migration viable, particularly the IT-strapped organizations that can benefit the most.

–      Big data workloads will force many companies to consider these alternatives to traditional databases, and cloud deployment models will simplify the rollout. Look for vendors providing supported NoSQL solutions.

–      Solid-State Disk Storage Tiers in the Cloud: By offering high-performance tiers of storage that are SSD-based (mainly NAND flash), cloud providers will be able to address the needs for predictable and faster application response times.

–      With data storage still commanding a per-GB operating expense in the cloud, deduplication and compression technologies have become rather ubiqitous in helping minimize costs.

–      More Use of the Cloud for Analytics

–      While many companies will adopt clouds in 2012, others may still wait and ponder well past 2012.

–      The Cloud Outages will Propel the Organizations to Forage for Better Quality Service Providers.

–      The reliability factor is a decisive player in the success of a cloud implementation across corporate houses. People find it hard to transgress from the notion that Public clouds are less secure than the Private clouds.

–      The Cloud Bursts as the Global Economic Crisis Swell

–      The growth of mobile Cloud: Not only do a greater number of the public now operate their social and professional lives via mobile devices and tablet PCs this is only going to speed up the assimilation of the mobile Cloud and of course the demand for faster, more user friendly and storage happy applications – something the Cloud can deliver on in bucket loads.

–      The evolution of Cloud security: area of development that is accelerating at breakneck speed so much so that the Obama administration delivered a Federal Cloud Computing Strategy report identifying $20bn in spending (one quarter of the government’s total IT budget) that could be moved to the cloud.

–      A mobile-enabled workplace revolution: Cloud is now facilitating a faster, smoother way to send and store information than ever before.

–      Delivering quick and well coordinated cloud services would be the prime focus of managed cloud providers in the upcoming year. With agile cloud solutions not only will cloud providers be able to grab the attention of other organizations that are not on cloud but would also become more efficient in delivering the best services at the end of the day.

–      Critical concerns (both real and perceived) like (1) security, (2) privacy, (3) SLA and (4) compliance also remain – like credit card usage on net objections will slowly go away – but tipping point will not be 2012.

–      Neither cost saving nor flexibility is the primary driver for cloud adoption

–      High data storage and transfer costs, in particular, make the cloud unattractive for the very applications on which enterprises spend most of their IT budgets — the “core” or “mission-critical” ones. As cloud providers try to tap those more lucrative opportunities, they will be forced to significantly drive down cloud data prices.

–      A mobile workforce demands decision making on the move. Business Intelligence on the cloud will facilitate senior management to go mobile.

–      Ondemand ERP is a trending word in the industry. Many businesses are automating their processes through cloud-based ERP solutions. Moreover, since cloud-based ERP applications have become robust and light, it has enabled employees who travel frequently to access these applications using thin clients.

–      Acquisitions will be about filling out portfolios, less on customer footprints: Acquisition strategies will focus less on gaining customer footprint and more on what technologies are needed to fill out the portfolios of telcos, social media firms, large systems integrations and managed service providers to help them compete.

–      Cloud adoption will continue to trend upward.

–      As developers realize the benefits to moving the heavy lifting required by their applications to the cloud, they will move them over to reduce the demand placed on users machines. This will increase the number of systems that are capable of running their applications, and could also lead to increased performance of the application.

–      Compression techniques will be important in lowering storage costs.

–      Large cloud databases will centralize huge amounts of information.

Related articles

• SaaS Trends in 2012 (clean-clouds.com)
• Trends in Cloud Computing 2012 (clean-clouds.com)
• Private Cloud Trends in 2012 (clean-clouds.com)
• Recent Trends in Cloud Services Adoption (clean-clouds.com)
• Public Cloud Use-Cases (clean-clouds.com)