Why 2013 Could Be a Great Year for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing made big strides forward in 2012, and if a host of industry experts proves correct, it will make even bigger advances in 2013. As Forbes, CxoToday, GigaOM, and other news services that cover technology report, the experts forecast many more companies joining clouds or creating their own; new professional services emerging to manage the clouds and the data within them; and the clouds’ expansion transforming IT and work life in general worldwide.

image source: www.thehindu.com

“Whether it is public, private or personal clouds, we will undoubtedly look back on 2013 as the year that cloud computing became an integral part of IT,” writes Forbes.com contributor Rob Sabhlok.

Cloud computing is the operating of programs and storage of data and files in an online network, not on physical disks and hardware. That online network, or “cloud,” can take one of three forms:

• Private cloud. The business installs its own server and storage hardware but can shift workloads among servers as usage spikes or it deploys new applications.
• Public cloud. The business uses (via an online portal) a pre-constructed platform for computing, storage, and other services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an immensely popular public cloud platform—Best Buy and other e-commerce companies use it, and Netflix is building its entire infrastructure on it.
• Hybrid cloud. The platform includes both private and public cloud services. The business might run its app primarily on a private cloud but rely on a public cloud under certain conditions, such as when usage spikes. AWS struck a hybrid deal in 2011 with Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud-building software program, by which Eucalyptus would connect companies’ (Eucalyptus-supported) private clouds with AWS, so that the companies could move their data and programs to and from either platform.

image source: www.webapplication.com

Most of us use cloud computing in everyday life: Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Skype are all cloud services. Companies are rapidly moving dozens more programs and masses of internal files into the cloud, however. This year witnessed a “record build out of central data infrastructure,” according to Margaret Dawson, CloudTech.com writer and Symform’s vice-president of product management. She expects the cloud profusion to continue and, as a corollary, massive near-future increases in investment around data management, with particular focus on data protection, big data, data storage, and data classification.

The hybrid model will be most businesses’ favourite approach, according to Dawson, although large companies will prefer private clouds—the better to keep their data safe. Cloud services that offer such capabilities as single-sign-on (SSO), strong data encryption, and excellent storage management will draw the biggest sales. And, with memories of multiple cloud outages earlier this year still fresh, businesses will increasingly demand up-front service-level agreements (SLAs) and will pay more for stronger SLAs. We will start seeing clear “tiers” of SLAs from which a buyer can choose.

There are many reasons why businesses and organizations are flocking to the clouds, according to Edwin Schouten, Wired.com contributor. Cloud services can be deployed in much less time than traditional ones, so IT projects are finished and delivered to market much sooner. Those projects will also be much cheaper and potentially higher-quality. Meanwhile, employees free up more time for other productive activities. And—an added plus—cloud services make it easier to start innovation initiatives and thereby open up new revenue streams. Think Spotify and BitCasa, which both built their models and value propositions entirely using cloud services.

More Work, Less Office
The businesses and organizations that utilize cloud services attain yet another benefit, according to Forbes.com’s Sabhlok: Work increasingly moves out of the old confines of a 9-5 schedule in a physical office. Productivity will happen off-site, as well as on-site, and at all hours of the day (and night).

“2013 companies will embrace that they are 24×7 entities versus 9 to 5 businesses,” Sabhlok writes.

Sabhlok foresees businesses and organization moving a multitude of older technology platforms—such as help desk, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, and possibly the PBX virtual phone system—into the cloud next year. Some employers are still leery of utilizing cloud services because of data security concerns, Sabhlok acknowledges, but he is optimistic that the new open-source cloud platforms, such as Cloudstack and Openstack, will make the cloud more inviting and accessible even to those holdouts.

It’s a Question of Trust
To deploy a cloud service, a business or organization must trust a third-party vendor—i.e., the cloud service provider—with its own data. That’s a hurdle, but CXOToday.com contributor Sharon Lobo concurs with Sabhlok: Businesses are overcoming it.

Lobo cites a prediction by Vishal Anand Gupta, Joint Project Director HIMS and Manager Systems at India’s Calcutta Medical Research Institute, that hospitals will move more systems to the cloud so that they can put more focus on core business objectives. She also notes that the Pondicherry Co-operative Urban Bank selected IBM SmartCloud for its Core Banking Solution (CBS).

“There are perpetual issues like security and compliance, and there are temporary issues such as economic slowdown, weak SLAs, and regulations that will continue to hound the adoption of the cloud. However, no one can deny the fact that cloud will continue to overcome these hurdles and someday be the de-facto medium of consuming technology,” Lobo writes (italics added).

Of course, where there is a need, there are entrepreneurs offering services that address the need. GigaOM contributors Barb Darrow and Stacey Higginbothamm expect a profusion of new services next year that guard—or at least claim to guard—the privacy of apps and data that a company transfers into the cloud.

“Any company that can successfully make the public cloud a safe and secure repository for even regulated applications will be able to print money,” they write.

The two see more developments in store for 2013. Large companies increasingly will buy up cloud-savvy startups that will transition their buyers’ workloads to the cloud; companies that sell infrastructure-as-a-service (a cloud-service model in which the vendor offers hardware, storage, and certain other components, while the user is responsible for patching and maintaining the operating systems and application software; Amazon CloudFormation, DynDNS, and ReadySpace Cloud Services are examples) will offer new and improved apps; and a hybrid-cloud model that enables cloud bursting (in which an application runs in a private cloud or data center and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes), will debut. More companies will build OpenStack-based cloud services. And data-center operators will become more comfortable stretching their infrastructure over massively distributed outside networks.

A side-by-side comparison of the conventional software-system management model with the cloud vendor models infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS), platform-as-a-service (PAAS), and software-as-a-service (SAAS). image source: http://blog.csdn.net

“Next year, ‘the cloud’ will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there,” Darrow and Higginbothamm write.

The Sky is the Limit
The human mind has no physical limits. Imagination and creativity run as far as a person wills them to go. Computer software can doubtless go toward far greater use if it, too, frees itself from space and time. Therein lies the promise of cloud computing: Computational power that is infinitely vast and ubiquitous. Forward-thinking organizations and businesses have begun exploring cloud computing in earnest, and many more appear poised to join them in the year ahead. They and we can hope for great things to follow.