Cloud Computing In 2011: Private Clouds Are An Important Trend

The cloud computing ‘buzz’ has been going on now for 3 years. Benefits include reduced costs, improved service delivery and an enablement of business innovation.   Public clouds have been a major part of the discussion and experimentation.  However, many CIOs and business leaders are concerned with having their data residing outside their firewall.   So, in 2011, I expect we’ll see more companies adopting approaches to private clouds in parts of their businesses.  

Adoption Drivers

• Commoditization and standardization of technologies,
• Virtualization and the rise of service-oriented software Architectures,
• Dramatic growth in popularity/use of the Internet and the Web.

Adoption Inhibitors

• Bandwidth, Complexity, Standards, Security, Privacy, Compliance, Performance, Loss of Control of Data outside the firewall.

Analyst Perspective

As can be seen by the quotes below, more companies have begun adopting approaches to private clouds in parts of their businesses.  Analysts agree that enterprises will be interested in learning more about how to leverage private clouds within their own ecosystems.

“Almost one-quarter of the infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals polled in our Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010 said that building a private cloud is a high or critical priority for them. Five percent said it is critical.” – Forrester Research (Link)

“According to recent IDC survey results, almost half of respondents, 44%, are considering private clouds.” – IDC (Link)

“The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39 percent of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organization” – Gartner (Link)

“Private clouds’ are a natural next step in the evolution of data centers over the last ten years, toward consolidated, virtualized and automated IT service delivery environments.” - Frank Gens, IDC (Link)

“there is still some lingering apprehension over issues like integration, availability, security, and costs. These concerns, and how they are addressed by IT vendors, will continue to guide the adoption of cloud computing over the next several years.” – IDC (Link)

So the analysts agree that a growing number of organizations are turning to clouds to manage basic applications. Core business apps, IT infrastructure services, analytics, and app dev/test/deploy are next in line. However, as mentioned, since CIOs and business leaders are concerned with having their data residing outside their firewall, 

What To Expect In 2011

• Expect to see mid and large-sized businesses to increase their experimentation and implementation of private clouds as the promise of the cloud delivery model is one that is just too good to pass up. 
• There’s also a growing interest in private ‘community clouds’ hosted for a group of organizations who trust each other.
• Something else to watch out for this year is how cloud computing will impact the mobile infrastructure and ecosystems in 2011.

Since cloud is a disruptive new way to deliver software & services, cloud will enable both new opportunities as well as new competitors in all areas of business.

For More Information

• BusinessWeek:  Cloud Computing and CEO Guide to Cloud Computing
• CIO.com   Cloud Computing
• Forrester:  Cloud Computing
• Gartner:  Cloud Computing Technology Research
• IBM:  Cloud Computing
• IDC:  Cloud Research
• InfoTech:  Cloud Computing
• InfoWorld:  Cloud Computing
• Wikipedia:  Cloud Computing

Comments

[Ruby Badcoe]

Since it's already 2012, there was a big change in the trend of cloud computing since 2011. These online data back-up services are already accessible through mobile phones. Everyone can already use cloud computing since it's downloadable and webmail based. Photos and music can also be shared online. Business people are using them to store their important documents.

[hosting provider]

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