Five Cloud Computing Trends Until 2015

April 26, 2012 Off By David
Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Florence de Borja.

With the continuous monitoring of trends and updates for cloud computing, service providers will be able to avoid expensive mistakes. These providers won’t be able to miss any opportunity the market is offering for the succeeding years. Gartner Inc., a world-renowned advisory and research company in the field of information technology, has outlined five trends which can affect cloud strategy up to 2015.

According to David Cearly, Gartner fellow and vice president, cloud computing has changed the ways businesses and individuals choose to deliver or acquire IT services with less emphasis on traditional hardware and software licensing constraints. It has made an important effect on every facet of IT and the way users use business, information, and applications services. According to another Gartner fellow and vice president, David Mitchell Smith, due to the rapid change and evolution of cloud computing technologies and trends, cloud computing service providers have continuously misunderstood the cloud as they use it as a marketing term.  Because of the level of change, uncertainty, confusion, and impact, Gartner has released 5 trends which will enable cloud computing to accelerate, shift, or reach a tipping point until 2015…

With the various benefits cloud computing can deliver, a business organization can optimize its cloud investment by careful examination and mapping of different challenges such as integration needs, licensing constraints, supplier lock-in, availability and performance concerns, transparency, and security. Cloud computing can be utilized to shift the costs to operational from capital expenditures. It can also lessen complexity, provide greater agility, and reduce overall cost. Businesses can also take advantage of the shift of IT resources to value added activities beneficial for the business. Cloud computing can also serve as a foundation for business innovation as well as reduce potential risks.

Hybrid cloud will play an important role in cloud computing. Hybrid computing offers combination and coordination of off-site cloud services with an on-premise application or infrastructure services. It may be able to unify all platforms into a single cloud. According to Gartner, business entities must focus its efforts on data and application integration thereby linking fixed external and internal applications. Standards and guidelines must be set on the way these elements can be combined with the entity’s internal systems in order to implement a hybrid environment.

With the proliferation of cloud adoption, there is now a requirement for consumption assistance. A cloud brokerage, a service provider, can play an intercessory role in cloud computing. The market has become interested in cloud services brokerage last year and Gartner sees that the trend will continue and increase till 2015 because more and more users will use cloud computing services without the involvement of IT. IT departments, therefore, must analyze ways to position themselves as cloud services brokerage through the establishment of a purchasing process which will take into consideration cloud adoption as well as encourage business departments to approach an IT organization for support and advice. This may mean modification of current tools and processes like service catalogs and internal portals.

A lot of organizations are searching for opportunities to effect migration of their current workloads to the cloud. When workloads are deemed as important resource or when an application naturally provides horizontal scalability, a cloud centric structure becomes important. Each application must be designed with particular opportunities, limitations, and characteristics fitted for cloud computing. Gartner suggests business organizations to search beyond workload migration to the establishment of applications which are cloud optimized in order to fully take advantage of the cloud potentials.

Cloud computing will continue to lend its influence on future operational and datacenter models. Currently, a public cloud allows a business entity to act as a user of services while the cloud computing service provider handle the implementation details like related operational and data center models. These implementation models will greatly influence the way a business enterprise will create its own datacenters. Cloud computing concepts can be applied to infrastructure and data center investments in order to maximize efficiency and agility.