Cloud market triples in four years

While previously most cost saving debate about the cloud has focussed on the ability to cut capital expenditure by using a cloud service, Gartner vice president Nick Jones, today said that some organisations were “saving 50 per cent of their operational costs,” by moving to the cloud.

This saving he said was increasingly being seen as a source of innovation funding for CIOs who were still strapped for cash.

As a result demand for cloud computing services will grow at more than 20 per cent over the next four years, reaching $US150 billion by 2014 – three times the market’s current size – according to Gartner.

The 1500 delegates attending Gartner’s Symposium in Sydney this week were today told that cloud computing was one of the main trends shaping the industry and user community now and into the future.

Social computing, context aware computing and pattern based strategy were the other three major trends to influence enterprise IT strategy in the near to mid term.

Mark McDonald, group vice president of executive programmes, warned that unless CIOs stepped up to the plate and developed strategies for using the cloud, business departments would take control themselves. He also stated that lingering concerns about cloud security and privacy would quickly evaporate.

“Ten years ago we faced the same objections with regard to offshore outsourcing.” He said that many of the same concerns regarding location and privacy of enterprise data were now being raised about cloud computing, “But they will be resolved.”