As most IT industry analysts will confirm, new developments in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) technologies, as well as advancements in public and private clouds, are among the top trends that will be strategic for most organisations in 2013.
A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available over the Internet. The public cloud is available to private as well as corporate users.
On the other hand, a private cloud (also called a corporate cloud) is a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people - staff and visitors - behind a firewall.
Advances in virtualisation and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and data centre managers to effectively become service providers, meeting the needs of their 'customers' within the corporation.
The hand-in-hand advancement of BYOD and cloud technologies, and their increasingly strategic roles within business, is recognised by most research organisations, including Gartner Research, which defines strategic technologies as "having the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years".
With such authoritative backing, it's perhaps opportune to examine the latest evolutions in these technologies and how their progress will affect organisations in the next 12 months.
Coming together
Today, one of the most relevant aspects of private and public cloud technologies is their convergence. While mobile devices and the cloud are already revolutionising the way business is conducted, the converged cloud represents an emerging technology platform that will take users far into the future.
The signs are already evident. For example, it's a sure bet that at some point in 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the preferred option for Internet access. With the arrival of Windows 8, there will be three operating system platforms, including Apple iOS and Android, vying for supremacy.
This will present a challenge to organisations that will have to accommodate all three in their planning, while accepting a proliferation of enterprise-facing applications (apps) from staff and visitors to their networks.
The cloud will soon replace the PC as the location for the storage of private information.
However, the long-term view highlights a gradual shift away from these so-called 'native apps' (based on current platforms) to Web apps, underlined by the emergence of the currently-under-development HTML5 as a capable mark-up language.
HTML5's potential is heightened by its ability to accommodate application programming interfaces (APIs) for ever-increasingly complex Web applications.
Against this backdrop, it's a certainty that, from an individual's perspective at least, the cloud will soon replace the PC as the location for the storage of private information, and become the portal via which users will access an often unique collection of tailored services and preferred Web sites.
Of value
From an organisation's standpoint, while a (usually free) public cloud places emphasis on delivering individualised, hosted services across BYOD devices for staff members, hybrid clouds will allow companies to become 'value centres', meeting the challenges and providing solutions to all BYOD users - staff members, stakeholders, customers, and potential customers alike.
A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud, and is a cloud computing environment in which an organisation provides and manages some resources held in-house and others provided externally. For example, an organisation might use a public cloud service for archived data, but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data.
The big business benefits of a hybrid approach include the opportunity to accommodate burgeoning data volumes and deal with the increasing complexity of tomorrow's content management systems and data services, without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities.
More importantly, it will also accommodate the increasing need for companies to perform analytical, modelling and simulation exercises for almost every aspect of business, as competition ramps up and the consequences of unpredicted failures in an unpredictable economic climate become increasingly catastrophic.
While the cloud is increasingly seen as the 'glue' that connects and binds the many BYOD devices that support different aspects of users' daily lives, we can expect the clear division between private and public cloud services to blur rapidly, with most private cloud services becoming hybrid in a demonstration of the continuous move towards technology convergence.
The key to success will lie in the planning for this eventuality and leveraging it when it happens. There are signs of this in evidence already. It could become a reality in 2013.
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