The Best of Both Clouds?

Grazed from BillingWorld. Author: Craig Galbraith.

A new year brings new opportunities and seven key challenges for IT managers. While this new white paper discusses "Seven communications trends for 2013," today we will focus on just one: the cloud! According to a recent Gartner study, cloud computing was expected to grow 19 percent, from $91 billion in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, the 2012 number will nearly double to $207 billion. Forrester Research’s The Cloud Computing Playbook suggests that "Cloud computing has reached an inflection point for enterprises — a comprehensive strategy for its use is now required.

Until now, most companies ha[ve] adopted cloud services in an ad hoc fashion, driven mostly by business leaders and developers looking to deliver new systems of engagement they felt could not be delivered by corporate IT — or in the time frame required. These ad hoc experiences prove that cloud solutions are now ready to be strategic resources in your business technology portfolio."…

Small and midsize organizations will likely gravitate to public clouds, which are designed to provide the lowest cost-sharing basis with utility style pricing, but also mean the sharing of resources among a variety of companies. The public-cloud model can come with considerable risks like security, spamming, and sometimes, infrastructure reliability issues, as happened when Netflix’s service went offline on Christmas Eve, thanks to Amazon’s public cloud. It’s key to investigate vendors and how they mitigate public-cloud risks before you trust one with your communications applications…

Read more from the source @ http://www.billingworld.com/blogs/avaya/2013/02/the-best-of-both-clouds.aspx