A Year In Cloud Computing

A Year in Cloud Computing

by

Nick J Davies

Since we are now trudging our way through the third month of the year (and hasn t it, much like the other 11, gone quickly?) I thought I would have a quick reminisce and look back at 2012, the predictions, and how much 2013 is looking to meet those predictions so far.

If you ve read my previous articles, you ll know that cloud computing is constantly seeing more and more take-up and 2013 isn t going to be any different. Just a quick browse of the Internet and you will see that the Cloud predictions for 2013 show a lot of promising figures. So, yes, there s a lot to be said for this field. However, as with every new technology going mainstream, there s also some issues that should be considered thoroughly something that any good cloud computing service provider would be glad to help you out with. So let s take a look at some of the more popular issues or concerns:

Security;

Security has always been a concern for people considering the adoption of Cloud-computing. From my point of view, the same applies to every IT infrastructure that businesses plan to adopt. However, the fact that a third-party provider is handling your IT system definitely emphasizes the importance of this topic. And already, we have undoubtedly seen a lot more people employed and specially trained to deal with this concern: cloud and social engineering experts are hired to reinforce and reassure the topic of security and should be able to explain the different efforts that are made so as to keep a cloud-computing environment secure.

Private social networking;

Social networking has gone viral in the last couple of years. But while the fact that user-generated content is a huge game-changer, a lot of companies have so far not bought into social network sites be it because of fear of privacy or because they would much prefer to implement similar sharing features within their organization such as hosted SharePoint. Social networks are in fact, just typical cloud-computing implementations where users don t have to deal with infrastructure or software – they are simply the tools enabling you to produce content for your chosen audience whether that be corporate/private like SharePoint or public like Twitter. I anticipate that in 2013, companies will try to adopt more private social networking features in the cloud so as to enable their employees to share and interact more.

Data-centre move to the cloud;

User-generated content means that there s a lot of data (useful or not) produced on a daily basis. This also means that the demand in terms of storage as well as data mining will exponentially increase. But this also means that the company would need reliable infrastructure- and one of the best solutions for that is to go the cloud-computing route. Not only can the company increase its capacity storage as it s need evolves, but cloud-computing also offers it a reliable and scalable solution that will always meet it s needs.

Bring-Your-Own-Device;

The Bring-Your-Own-Device will definitely gain more importance in the corporate world. Simply put, this means that users can bring whatever mobile device they want to access corporate-resources. However, for this to work, corporate IT infrastructure needs to be inline with that policy – and this is where cloud computing comes in handy.

Do you see any other major trends in the cloud computing industry that we can expect for in the second quarter? Feel free to share.

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A Year in Cloud Computing