Cloud Networking Changes Everything

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Phillip Spies.

The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is booming and expected to grow by 47 percent, from $6 billion in 2012 to $9 billion in 2013, according to Gartner’s Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q Update. Additionally, the overall public cloud computing market, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), IaaS and other related services, will grow from $110 to $131 billion over the same period with a CAGR of 41.3 percent through 2016. While this projected growth is significant, cloud computing still represents less than three percent of the $3.7 trillion spent on IT per year. This begs the question, If cloud computing is so hot, why is it still just three percent of the overall IT industry?

It might be helpful to look back to when cloud IaaS was introduced to the market more than eight years ago by Amazon.com. The primary goal was to provide computing capacity at a lower cost than actual physical servers. Since then, many other cloud service providers have jumped on the bandwagon to offer low-cost, best-effort cloud services. Yet, while a market for these services clearly exists, most don’t meet the enterprise requirements for a more reliable and secure computing platform. The problem lies in the fundamental challenge that end users have in using a server-centric cloud approach to solve problems better addressed by networks…

Red Flags

Security breaches cost U.S. businesses significant amounts of time and money, and carry legal ramifications for strictly regulated financial and medical institutions. As such, it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that it is the main concern for 71 percent of corporate technology decision makers when evaluating cloud services for business critical workloads, as reported by a recent Intel survey. The same study found that 28 percent of IT professionals have experienced a public cloud-related security breach – which, according to 65 percent of respondent companies, is a greater percentage than with traditional IT infrastructures…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/05/cloud-networking-changes-everything/