Cloud Trends For 2012 – The Year The Cloud “Got Real”

Our CTO, John Engates, recently spoke about how 2012 is going to be a real crunch year for cloud computing.

As we now look to more refined and attuned levels of cloud adoption and deployment across every industry vertical, John shares his vision for the cloud in 2012 and beyond; here is it in bite-sized portions.

1. Must have SaaS

   If you think about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and what is changing right now, you can see that enterprise software vendors of all types are starting to panic if they find that they don’t have a SaaS delivery mechanism in place. This means that they will now move to try and acquire other companies who can help bring a service-layer element to their business – and let’s be honest, panic buying of any kind is rarely prudent.

   As vendors realise that they must have these SaaS layers in place, a less than natural consumption and acquisition process may result. This could lead to a more fragmented level of overall service offerings being delivered, compared that is to what might have evolved more organically. Put simply, the road ahead could be a little bumpy for a while.

2. It’s Time To Get Real

   Now is the time that we’re going to witness real enterprise adoption of the cloud. We are still working through the so-called ‘global economic slowdown’, where customers have turned to cloud for cost savings. But as we begin to emerge from the slowdown, these same customers and others will start to reap extended benefits from cloud computing to go faster and compute more profitably. In other words, people have learned from these recessionary times and, as things improve, will be able to use that knowledge for further competitive advantage.

   Allied to this point is the feedback we have heard from customers regarding security in the cloud vs dedicated environments – as well as the compliance and performance issues that are also raised here. A lot of these shortcomings (if indeed they are real objections) are now being properly addressed by those of us in the cloud computing industry – bringing the reality of the cloud home and making it real.

3. Hybrid Is Here

   We’ll see more and more production environments going live with hybrid clouds as this area has already proven very popular in terms of real adoption this year. Hybrid means you can mix and match different form factors and even different types of cloud. It also of course means that customers are able to keep their most mission-critical sensitive data in private cloud data centres and utilise the public cloud to its best advantage for flexibility and cost saving.

4. Mobile Cloud Devices

   Another big driver for cloud computing demand in 2012 will be mobile and tablet usage, as consumers seem to want to consume everything in devices of this size. These devices rely on a constant connection to the cloud via the web so that it is impossible to deliver the consumer experience expected here without embracing the cloud. These units may as well be classed as cloud devices!

5. Open Source Honesty

   Open source will also have a huge impact on the future of the cloud, and specifically here we are talking about OpenStack in terms of the way future cloud infrastructures will be laid down. Cloud computing is still so new and nascent in many senses that an adherence to open standards is really the only way we should progress. To use a more traditional enterprise software approach to the cloud (instead) would be almost counter-intuitive in terms of a sensible way forward.