Expert: Hybrid cloud, Platform-as-a-Service lead 2012 cloud trends
Thursday, December 22, 2011 11:45:35 PM
Cloud computing has changed the way IT departments secure data, deploy applications and connect devices, and many experts believe the cloud industry will further accommodate IT needs in 2012.
In a recent Fortune column, cloud computing expert Mathew Lodge describes the five trends that he believes will dominate the cloud market next year. According to Lodge, businesses will increasingly use hybrid clouds to keep some private company data within their organization, while gaining valuable computing power from public cloud providers.
"Public cloud usage has driven a revolution in computing, especially for hard-to-forecast customer-facing applications. Private clouds are essential to organizations dealing with regulators, standards and other non-technical issues that are crucial to running business applications," Lodge explains. "The choice is driven by the needs of the business and the application."
Lodge also believes Platform-as-a-Service will become a frequently used technology for developers, while cloud outages will make organizations further investigate the quality of a cloud provider before signing a service-level agreement. Businesses will continue to believe the private cloud contains less security risks, despite research and several experts dismissing that trend, the report said.
According to a recent survey, 67 percent of businesses are using or plan to add Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, while 75 percent of respondents expect IT as a Service to become an enterprise trend.
-McAfee Cloud Security
