The Future of Cloud Computing – 10 Predictions

The cloud is revolutionizing computing as businesses and organizations shift from client-server model to cloud computing. In the next years, technology experts and users expect to ‘live mostly in the cloud’ as they work through cyberspace-based applications accessed from networked devices.

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Here are the 10 cloud predictions for the next year.

1. Large organizations will host important applications with cloud providers like AWS and Rackspace. Also, commodity IaaS providers will build up their services for these enterprises.
2. There will be an increase in solid-state drives among commodity and enterprise IaaS providers. New classes of applications and services will be made possible to run optimally in the cloud.
3. In the private cloud space, there will be contraction. The presence of large-vendors and OpenStack-based products will make way for less-successful startups to gather acquisitions. Specialized private cloud startups won’t have a hard time finding buyers as they will begin rounding out their private cloud portfolios with acquisitions that deliver specific capabilities.
4. As large vendors realize the need to stake their claims, PaaS acquisitions and launches will be a profitable market. HP, Dell and even Oracle will facilitate PaaS in their public and/or private offerings.
5. The convergence of big data will continue. It will result to advanced analytics features, publicly hosted data-crunching services like the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and optimization of private cloud software as it incorporate Hadoop clusters or other parallel-processing systems into the cloud infrastructure.
6. Bigger revenue will be generated for startups that address data-center-to-cloud latency. With the rapid improvement of intra-cloud computing, storage and networking performance, one hindrance would be moving some applications types to the public cloud because of the large quantities of existing data.
7. AWS will be launching a partner program to increase integration with private cloud software. There will also be an open source play for the growing OpenStack support.
8. After the data breach that involves an IaaS cloud or cloud storage service, we will get to see the emergence of a de facto or an official cloud security standard. Cloud providers will be driven to agree on a security protocol that is much better that what they currently have.
9. There will be an increase in PaaS offerings for specialized mobile platforms because Apple’s iCloud and other consumer-focused cloud services’ popularity.  The current PaaS offering are not well-suited for mobile applications. Developers will look into cloud-based gaming and other mobile applications.
10. Data virtualization will pick up its momentum as data integration gives way. Data virtualization offers the benefits of centralized access without the need to maintain extract-transform load (ETL) system or as large a data warehouse, critical differences as data sources multiply to include SaaS applications, cloud servers and mobile devices.