Enteracloud Identifies Top 5 Emerging Cloud Computing Trends

Such discussions have led to a series of emerging trends that bear further scrutiny by the entire cloud community – vendors and users alike. To help clients quickly identify important topics for discussion in the cloud, Enteracloud has compiled a list of five trends that prove there’s no reason to resist moving mission-critical data into the cloud any longer.

1.    Private cloud deployment is fast and furious. There has been a rapid rise in private cloud adoption among large enterprises. This isn’t really a surprise as there are a fairly robust set of infrastructures and applications that enterprise IT staff manage and they want to take advantage of the tools and technologies available in the private cloud space – such as multi-tenancy, service automation and self service portals. Companies are moving past traditional San Diego Colocation, Phoenix Colocation and Los Angeles Colocation. IT staffs think in terms of three core capabilities or “services stacks” that cloud computing can provide their organizations: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the familiar Software as a Service (SaaS). Private Clouds provide a framework to streamline the delivery of these IT services to internal customers, enabling business agility while reducing cost.

2.    The hybrid cloud is here to stay. Across all sectors in both large and mid-size enterprises, it’s clear that the hybrid cloud computing model – linking an internal, premises-based private cloud with the capabilities and bandwidth of public clouds – is here to stay. Companies are looking at application stratification when making decisions. Certain types of CRM, collaboration and messaging applications are seen as appropriate for public clouds, while applications with more sensitive or private information – such as those with industry or government compliance requirements – are being architected to reside within private infrastructures or application spaces that exist within the four walls of the enterprise. “We can appreciate that separation and the reasons for it,” Doscher says. “The Enteracloud Enterprise Cloud Platform offers a shared, multi-tenancy environment that enables us to consult and build a roadmap for our customers. We leverage ITSM and business processes to allow customers to take their existing private cloud infrastructure and build a blueprint that addresses application cloud awareness, connectivity, and security in building one’s hybrid cloud strategy.”

3.    Consolidation is inevitable. Every technology and industry has gone through cycles of consolidation and while the trend isn’t new, it seems to be one that is gaining traction in the cloud. Customers are seeking to deploy applications in different ways creating demand for consolidation of the cloud delivery models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – in the form of a unified stack as a service delivery model. This may be a harbinger of consolidation of cloud service providers as well, in order to provide greater economies of scale to customers. Today a provider may be focused on infrastructure, but with no linkage to the applications. Or a provider may be focused on software, but with no capabilities to manage their cloud-based infrastructure. There is a customer requirement for these capabilities going forward and an effort needs to be made to consolidate infrastructure and platform, bridging these two areas where integration makes the most sense. Doing so allows customers to take advantage of an elastic infrastructure with platform hooks for building and running custom applications.

4.    Application-specific cloud communities are forming. In public space in particular, discussions around application-specific cloud communities are on the rise, particularly so in three central areas:     Application Performance Communities     Regulatory Communities     Location-Based Services Communities

5.    Managed Services get a cloud twist. Cloud computing has refueled interest in “outsourcing” tasks and organizations are again looking to managed services as they reassess their resource strategies. They are not focused on the ability to utilize a virtual machine, but are focused on the management of infrastructure and taking advantage of the services that cloud computing offers. So, the cloud has become the trigger for discussion and a renewed interest and demand for managed services.