Q5 Cloud Computing – What is the Future of Cloud Services?
After analysing what Cloud computing is, the advantages as well as differences from Dedicated Servers, we should say something about how Cloud Computing will evolve in the future.
Cloud and Social
The convergence of mobile technology, cloud and social networking will accelerate, and by the end of 2012, cloud apps that are not “socially aware” and without mobile support will be looked down on, as “legacy apps”. We will see more and more application vendors bringing feature parity into their apps for different mobile applications. Towards the end of 2012, mobile web apps will dominate over native apps.
Value-added services enter the competitive arena
After the past few years of building underlying platforms and placing data centers around the world, it’s time for the cloud service providers to face-off on higher levels of services – competition will be around Quality of Service, but also managed cloud offerings and professional services.
Cloud Brokerage and Computing Consulting will grow dramatically
Clouds are becoming more prevalent with more options, configurations, and services are cluttering the marketplace. To that end, companies will need to understand these options and how it can benefit their organisations. Cloud companies will further develop their own professional services in order to assist companies navigate and design their custom solutions (unless of course these cloud providers are extremely commoditised and only offer DIY solutions). Consultancies will continue to evolve and new ones form, leveraging and implementing the best practices of multiple cloud services.
Networking
Complex networking will emerge as a critical success factor: Somewhat in the background till now, the need to provide full configurability for networking in the hybrid model is rising in the list of cloud “must-haves.” Many early cloud service models have flattened the network and prevented enterprise control and flexibility. New and better options will continue to emerge.
More Private Cloud
After spending the last few years testing the public cloud for point projects, enterprise users will start to utilise private cloud for mission critical and data-sensitive applications. Heavy virtualisation users will start augmenting high-availability virtual infrastructure by creating private clouds to reap the benefits of resource pooling, self-service and elasticity on top of their existing virtual infrastructure.
Cloud Hosted DesktopsWhat’s good for the server, may be good for the desktop. With the success of Google Docs, DropBox and other mobile productivity tools it sets the stage for greater virtual desktop adoption. Look for more virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions paired with data-as-a-service allowing users to take their desktop computing everywhere (think iPad) without requiring a wholesale migration.
Private Cloud solutions will continue to lead the way as organisations continue to look for further efficiencies and increased agility to complement their initial server virtualisation investments, combined with deploying “capable” applications and some new workloads to public cloud services.
Netcetera offer Cloud Solutions from as little as £14.99/pm for Windows and £14.00/pm for Linux.
Previous Posts
- Q1 – What is Cloud Computing?
- Q2 – What are Cloud Services?
- Q3 – What are the Benefits of Cloud Computing?
- Q4 – When Should I Use a Cloud Server rather than a Dedicated Server?
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