Mobile cloud computing is on the rise

The widespread adoption of cloud computing and mobile is changing our lives, the way we do business and how we handle our day-to-day chores. In many ways, mobility and cloud computing play a significant role from both a consumer and enterprise user standpoint.

While mobility provides worldwide customer experience allowing users to access feature rich applications on the go, cloud provides a robust, scalable and reliable platform to host the data and applications. Basically, cloud with its highly scalable and economical model forms an effective backend for mobile devices and apps for their anytime, anywhere access.

Actually, several instances of such applications can be found today that rely on cloud in the backend and provide an intuitive user experience on mobile devices such as DropBox for Storage, Amazon & iBooks for literature, Pandora for music, Flickr & Instagram for photographs, YouTube for videos  and Google Docs, Office 365 & SkyDrive for document editing and storage.

According to a study from Juniper Research, the cloud-based mobile market will generate annual revenue of $9.5 billion in 2014 from $400 million in 2009, at an average annual increase of 88%. With this mind, let’s take a look at the factors that are fostering the adoption of mobile cloud computing:

• Trends and demands – customers expect the convenience of using a company website or application from anywhere and at anytime. Mobile devices can provide this convenience. Enterprise users require always-on access to business applications and collaborative services so that they can increase their productivity from anywhere, even when they are on the commute.

• Improved and increased broadband coverage – 3G, 4G and LTE along with WiFi, femto-cells, fixed wireless etc. are providing better connectivity for mobile devices.

• Enabling technologies – HTML5, CSS3, hypervisor for mobile devices, cloudlets and Web 4.0.

Potential issues in mobile cloud computing

With the increasing use of our smartphones, mobile applications are storing your data in the cloud as opposed to on the mobile device, and the applications become more powerful as processing power is also offloaded to the cloud.

Of course with developments in technology come potential problems.  The lack of speedy mobile Internet access everywhere is the primary problem.  Depending on your coverage, you could be stuck in an area where 3G may be a bit spotty which leads to slow connection speeds.  Battery life is also an annoying problem. So, although significant research and development is available in the mobile cloud computing industry, the following domains still need further research:

• Architectural issues – Reference architecture for a heterogeneous environment is a crucial requirement for unleashing the power of mobile computing towards unrestricted computing.

• Mobile communication congestion – Mobile data traffic is tremendously hiking by ever increasing mobile user demands for exploiting cloud resources which have an impact on mobile network operators and demand future efforts to enable smooth communication between mobile and cloud endpoints.

• Energy-efficient transmission – Mobile cloud computing requires frequent transmissions between cloud platforms and mobile devices, due to the debatable nature of wireless networks. This is why the transmission protocol should be carefully designed.

• Context-awareness issues – Context-aware and socially-aware computing are inseparable attributes of current computers. To achieve the vision of mobile computing among heterogeneous converged networks and computing devices, designing resource – efficient environment-aware applications is an essential need.

• Trust, security, and privacy issues – Trust is an essential factor for the success of the evolving mobile cloud computing industry.

Mobile cloud computing is gaining stream, and enterprise mobility solutions are mostly driven around the focus on how they can provide the business with agility, enhanced productivity and a platform for innovation using cloud platforms. So, is your business ready?

Photo credit: www.high-level-software.com