Three top trends in Cloud Computing

Many industry experts believe that Cloud computing is the future of IT and most CIOs plan to invest heavily in this technology. Let us look at three top trends that are shaping the Cloud computing landscape.

Cloud Service Brokers

While many analysts and industry experts classify IT service providers and B2B provider firms as Cloud Service Brokers, we would like to bring in a different perspective of what a CSB could mean. According to us, a Cloud Service Broker is an architectural pattern that can be implemented by organizations to manage their relationships with different Cloud service providers. It is a reusable pattern, similar to a real-life Broker which brings multiple parties together to make a deal. This pattern is valuable in situations where there is a mix of private and public cloud providers for a given need.

It could also mean a company, people or a group that assists enterprises looking for cloud adoption, in negotiating multiple contracts with multiple cloud service providers (multiple payments, multiple data streams and having to monitor multiple providers). While there is definitely merit in working with such CSB companies, they may not form the only definition or an all encompassing definition of the function or element of what a Cloud service broker is. These companies do have a lot of experience dealing with multiple Cloud Service Providers and bring best practices to make it safe, easy and less expensive to adopt the cloud.

Mobile Cloud Computing
Many industry experts believe that “Cloud computing” is the “future of the web”. However Cloud computing’s potential doesn’t begin and end with the traditional PC. Mobile computing is is being heavily impacted by this technology as well.

Mobile Cloud computing is a convergence of Cloud computing, mobile and networking. Applications are run on a remote Cloud server and data is sent to the mobile user. Both the data storage and data processing happens outside the mobile device. This results in a more consistent user experience across different platforms and network providers, as well as overcoming the restrictions of operating systems and hardware. Users are not required to download applications onto their mobile devices. Many experts believe that Cloud computing is a disruptive force in the mobile world and will eventually be the dominant way in which mobile applications work.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid Cloud is a Cloud computing environment which is partially hosted inhouse and has some resources provided externally. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public Cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. Considering compliance issues, performance requirements, and security restrictions, not all IT resources can exist in public Clouds today. A hybrid approach helps helps companies decide what compute cycles and data have to be kept local and what can be process remotely.

The hybrid Cloud approach provides a roadmap for the implementation of Cloud for most companies. The hybrid model mixes specific aspects of existing IT infrastructure like storage and computing to occur in public Cloud environments, and the remainder of the IT infrastructure stays in-house.

So is your organization ready for the future of Cloud computing? Please leave your comments and let us know what you think about these trends and do share your experiences with us.