2014 cloud strategies include renewed security focus, business motivations

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

In the first part of this two-part story, CIOs and cloud experts noted that 2014 will be the year when cloud comes into its own. Real planning, with an eye toward end-to-end solutions will take the place of piecemeal use of cloud solutions and services, they said. The second part of this story looks at the maturation of Infrastructure as a Service, a new security focus spurred by revelations of NSA practices, the renewed importance of IT service catalogs and why cost is no longer the biggest driver behind cloud adoption.

One aspect that will make the transition to cloud go more smoothly, said Ed Anderson, analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., is the maturity of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He predicts that 2014 will see IaaS move from handling the low-risk workloads like testing and development to the mainstream…

"People are starting to say, ‘Let’s retire some of our data center servers and replace those with IaaS,’" Anderson said. "And likewise let’s move some of our lower-risk workloads like content management or email out to the cloud data center and stop managing all the infrastructure on our own."…

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