The Road Ahead: Cloud and IT Predictions For 2012

With self-service, we will find more automation of what, today, we call the service desk. Things like connectivity, printing, passwords, and application requests all are close to being automated today, but they will get better as time progresses, and real competition from Microsoft and Google in this area will speed things along.

• Microsoft will find traction for Office 365 in the small business community, but will see overall slow adoption.

Today, our children already understand software as a service applications every time they play Xbox Live. They expect applications to be available in the cloud, and they expect a lot of features at an inexpensive price. So, it’s not a leap to see small business owners moving in this direction, as well.

The appearance of slow adoption will be more about the user’s ability to adjust to the new capabilities of Office 365. Users can appreciate email and calendars right away, but, although Skype itself is free, many small businesses pay for a land line to use it, although they are beginning to leave their phone service providers for VOIP solutions. There will be a hockey stick effect of adoption at some point, but it won’t be in 2012, or even in 2013.  When it does happen, people will wonder why they ever installed Office software on a client.  In fact, they might get the same look my son wears when we talk about Atari – wondering how on earth we ever managed to “game” with that.

• Software as a service growth will help drive wider adoption of cloud services.

Although SaaS offerings cover the spectrum of business anPostd technical applications, shared business services such as messaging, customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources are the most popular solutions. CRM has already become the most discussed SaaS application, thanks to the folks at SalesForce.com, and, if you look at the big three application providers, Oracle, SAP and IBM all know their longevity will depend on their ability to win in the SaaS space.

Apple is doing some of the best work of educating the masses right now, with their iCloud offering. It has helped the average consumer to understand more about cloud computing than any other single campaign out there today.

• Cloud service providers must dispel key concerns over compliance, security and access management controls with better tools and practices, improved monitoring and solution certification.

People like it when a platform is certified and protected. However, when it comes to real compliance and security, it is really the applications on that platform that matter. To have complete security, the environment must be locked down from user interface through to operating system, and rounded out with physical security over the hardware, as well.

Cloud service providers are dealing with the same challenges that exist in any data center, with one major difference – with today’s portable workloads, we need to make sure portability doesn’t allow that which previously was certified to become broken.  Automation that will occur within clouds must be well documented, thought out, tested, and verified, just like a manual process.

• Microsoft Hyper-V will gain share and begin overcoming VMware‘s market dominance.

Hyper-V adoption will slowly erode the market share currently enjoyed by VMWare, and position Microsoft as a player in the virtualization market. It’s easy to pick on the market monopoly of VMware. Microsoft knows it must gain share here, and has been focused on this aspect for a couple of years now.

With virtualization adoption driving past 50 percent this year, users will want lower cost alternatives to the prices they pay today, and Microsoft is willing to forgo hypervisor revenue to win the management space and secure their long-term position for continued growth and penetration.

• Cloud usage will remain limited because of concerns about security, control and the maturity of the technology.

As a result, cloud-bursting, or moving excess workload to an external cloud when processing demands exceed internal data center resources hasn’t become popular. Again, cloud really is about the applications, and we know that applications aren’t easily contained and wrapped up as standalone units. Most of today’s critical applications are multi-tiered and have hooks into other business-critical infrastructure such as directories, single sign-on solutions, and, in some cases, even messaging and collaboration platforms.

Picking up a solution and moving from one location to another, therefore, is not as simple as some would hope.  If moving applications were so easy, corporate IT departments would be moving among data centers all the time, and history shows us that doesn’t happen easily.

• IT organizations will change how they operate and computerize on-site security because of growing use of cloud-based applications and more smart phones and tablets.

Corporate managers want greater transparency in the activities that support compliance-mandated governance processes. Meeting these concerns will result in many changes in the way enterprise IT organizations operate and automate on-premises identity systems. No one is happy when they have to call the service desk and ask for a password to be reset. It doesn’t matter if the reset was done in 30 seconds flat and beats the industry average time; the user response is “so what.”

The best the user can hope for is never to have to open a ticket. Identity and access management technology has the best opportunity today for increased IT self-service. The proliferation of devices has made it increasingly difficult to manage the things users require to gain access to a corporate network, its printers and applications; but, by driving greater automation into these processes, IT also will have to ensure that compliance is managed and reported in an equally efficient manner. Yesterday’s monolithic, big identity platforms are not as easily adapted to this new way of doing business. IT will be looking for solutions to help them automate.

• Employees will face increased monitoring of their social networking activities with adoption of more reporting solutions and granular controls, as most organizations are blind to the breadth and depth of social networking use, and abuse, within their employee base.

We have long known that employees are the single biggest threat to fraud and to a company’s loss prevention activities. With today’s public displays of communication, and people using otherwise free services, the biggest benefit a company derives from monitoring employees’ social networking activities is the ability to replay what an employee said or did in cyberspace. The most sensitive organizations already are performing this type of intelligence-gathering on their employee populations. We readily adopt consumer tracking to determine the effect of consumer behavior on our business. It’s equally important, if not more so, to monitor employee social networking behavior to protect our company image and manage what is being said about us – and by whom.