Whatever else 2010 might have been, it was the Year of the Cloud. Cloud computing became the buzz phrase of the moment, with Salesforce.com, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, Rackspace, Dell and others investing major efforts to position themselves in the new clouds. But what’s ahead for cloud computing?
It depends who you ask, of course. For instance, a new study by Cisco Systems, released earlier this month, found opportunity for enterprises and service providers.
For enterprises, the report projected that almost 12 percent of all enterprise workloads will run in the public cloud by the end of 2013. This includes not only desktop applications, e-mail, collaboration and enterprise resource planning, the study said, but potentially any application. “Enterprise executives,” the report said, “believe that no applications should be automatically excluded from migration to the cloud.”
‘Misconceptions Abound’
The report said the key opportunity for service providers is that they could “differentiate themselves by becoming cloud service providers.”
The study involved in-depth interviews with more than 80 enterprise IT decision-makers in 43 enterprises and public-sector organizations in the U.S. It said the key issues determining migration decisions revolve around perceptions by executives about security and control, data-center overcapacity and scale, and the availability of skilled IT people.
But discerning patterns in the clouds, as any sky-watcher can assert, depends on one’s perspective and disposition. While Cisco’s study focuses on opportunities, a new study from Gartner describes cloud computing as currently at “the peak of inflated expectations.”
“Misconceptions abound, especially as they relate to cost-cutting,” the Gartner report said.
Nevertheless, the study found that half of the world’s 1,000 largest companies will be using external cloud-based services for the top 10 revenue-generating processes within the next five years. To handle that volume and the complexities of integrating and coordinating cloud suppliers, Gartner envisions that…