Cloud Computing Trends of 2012

This year, the winds of change have blown the cloud to a higher level. Studies predict that cloud computing will be on the rise for some a long period of time and that it will be a major source of revenue and employment globally by 2015. Industry experts also say that ultimately everything will be in the cloud, including migrating all physical hardware, software, platforms, services and processing.

There is no question that cloud computing evolved enormously this year. In 2012, we’ve seen:

• Increased confidence in cloud for mission-critical applications, according to the second annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey;
• Cloud-based business process management (BPM) on the rise. About 40% of organizations with BPM initiatives use cloud computing to support at least 10% of the processes involved in those efforts, according to a recent research by Gartner Inc.
• Public cloud services market growing faster than expected. IT researcher Gartner reported in September that the public cloud services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide.
• Platform-as-a-Service being recognized as an enterprise-ready technology. Large enterprises are adopting the architecture due to its highly reliable and scalable qualities.
• A leverage of cloud technologies in application development due to their speed, cost-savings, reliability and security.
• Increased use and wider acceptance of hybrid clouds according to Delloite Tech Trends for 2012.
• The cloud becoming one of the best alternatives when it comes to support, monitoring and data management. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is lately one of the most needed and required cloud computing categories.
• The cloud is taking big data analysis to the next level. With unlimited resources, the cloud allows huge datasets to be created and processed quickly and easily.
• Cloud services are mixing. Companies started mixing IaaS and PaaS solutions to take advantage of both and to decrease their overall IT spend.

There is no doubt that in the coming years, cloud computing will be one of the major players and driving force in the technology market.