Top Cloud Trends

There are many ideas on what the current and future cloud trends are.  This is my take on what’s happening and what will happen this year.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity as a service

Everyone is looking for a model that has no down time, even in times of a disaster.  This was called hot site failover, and still follows the same thought process.  The cloud offers this service to companies without forcing them to provide their own dedicated infrastructure, even if they keep their production systems in-house.

Managed private clouds are the wave of now.  Many are building their own private clouds; however, this comes with the same risks and costs of managing an in-house IT infrastructure.  Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of a shared cloud, despite significant developments in security and compliance features.  A managed public cloud offering, including storage, provides the outsourcing of management and support while maintaining the requirements that are cultural, corporate, government or industry driven. Because of cost, determining factors like industry and company size will allow only certain companies to be able to move to this offering.
Academic do-it-yourself private cloud

For educational institutions, budget is tight while creativity, knowledge and ownership is in full supply.  Colleges and universities are looking at private clouds and cloud storage as options for coursework, student information, including grades, that don’t need to be housed onsite with aging hardware.  Institutions often want to build, configure and maintain their own environment using the latest tools and utilities. This option provides an arena that meets all their needs.

Analytics as a service

Analytics has been a valued and important offering; and moving that to the cloud as an integrated service is happening now. Most of the top cloud providers are offering this and adoption rates are going to soar this year in an effort to benefit from lower cost analysis, data loading and reporting.

Anneke Leigh
Solutions Executive
IBM CMS
cell: (408) 384-9375
emaill: aleigh@us.ibm.com
IBM 2013 Services Leadership Award Winner