Cloud computing will be the hottest technology topic in 2013. That's not just my opinion, but also that of some of the best brains in the business, including leading IT executives, global vendors and industry analysts.
It's not surprising. Cloud technology is already a serious force to be reckoned with, having become a scalable services consumption and delivery platform in the field of services computing.
Today, the cloud consists of a number of service models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS - focusing on hardware, IT infrastructure management), software as a service (SaaS - including middleware as a service, or traditional CRM as a service), and platform as a service (PaaS - addressing the hardware architecture and software framework).
Then there is the application cloud (application as a service, UML modelling tools as a service, social networks as a service), and the business cloud (business processes as a service). These are all either well established, or on their way to being recognised as such.
At your service
What is obvious from the above - and the proliferation of the 'as a service' suffix - is that the industry is poised to enter the era of 'everything as a service'. In 2013, the cloud will change the way people work, improve customer service, and be instrumental in bringing new business benefits to the marketplace.
Those bold enough are forecasting that by the end of the year, the cloud will have been responsible for the reinvention of a significant number of organisations.
How will reliance on the cloud achieve this? One of the ways will be through the integration of cloud and mobile technologies. An increasing number of cloud projects are today being motivated by a requirement for mobile access to back-end applications. Many cloud service providers are offering (or are poised to offer) commercially available mobile back-end applications 'as a service'. The benefits are a more immediate response to mobile client needs, and the protection and screening of the end user's data centre from the manifold increases in data traffic that such applications bring.
The personal cloud will become a repository for an increasingly eclectic collection of Web destinations and services.
Key advantages of this model are elasticity and scalability. This 'pay as you grow' approach to adding resources allows companies to pay only for the capacity they need, when they need it. It's a model that is already well received in a number of industry sectors - so much so that SaaS applications now generally come with a mobile client to enable organisations to securely configure and manage mobile devices.
IT organisations are also in line for reinvention, according to research group Gartner. It predicts that IT organisations will increasingly assume the roles of internal 'cloud services brokerages' - managing and overseeing the provisioning and consumption of often complex cloud services for 'their internal users and external business partners'.
Community affair
One of the most important trends on the cloud computing horizon is the rise of industry-specific and community clouds. These clouds will be designed and built to serve vertical markets in either the public domain (such as healthcare) or the private sector (finance, manufacturing and retail). They will be equipped to meet the specific demands of the markets, including security, labour regulation compliance and process evolution.
The BYOD (bring your own device) sector of the market will also increasingly fall under the influence of the cloud's shadow in 2013, with PC users - including laptop, smartphone and tablet users - following the trend towards greater adoption of personal clouds where, as Gartner says, users will 'centre their digital lives'. The personal cloud will become a repository for an increasingly eclectic collection of Web destinations and services.
One of the major adoptions of the past year was cloud storage for personal use. However, a challenge associated with this trend remains: how to back up data that are no longer under the users' control? Addressing it will become more urgent - and a little easier - this year, as a number of emerging solutions are expected to become available to resolve the problem.
In this light and on a larger scale, expect an uptick in cloud-based disaster recovery as a service solutions. Leveraging public cloud storage for backup and also for disaster recovery should prove increasingly viable as a best practice for many companies, particularly those looking for a cost-effective way to implement a mandated corporate DR strategy.
Perhaps sadly, the end of 2013 should also see the sun set on 'the cloud' as a defining term. Industry watchers believe that as 'everything as a service' or XaaS, becomes ubiquitous, so the nomenclature (but not the technology) will quietly fade into obscurity.
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