Year of Transition and Change: Five-Point Trend Forecast for Cloud Computing Development

This year is a weird year relative to cloud computing. This technology has become mainstream. However, there are still many suppliers that have been frustrated with the deployment rate of enterprises. Although all agree on the importance of cloud computing, many vendors see the slow pace of organizations deploying in-house cloud computing projects. You can imagine suppliers will be impatient with such a rate, but their frustration is far less than the early investors of these suppliers.

Nevertheless, the author (Bernard Golden, a CIO site columnist in the United States) predicts that 2013 will be a turning point in cloud computing. You can expect cloud computing trends to become even more vivid in 2013 and 2012, and will also make the incumbent feel uneasy, whether they be buyers or suppliers. Cloud computing will destroy the established order of things in the enterprise, which is uncomfortable for many people.

The following are the top five cloud computing trends in 2013:

1. "Enterprise Cloud" will change from market forecast to gluttonous feast

This year, vendors are continually predicting the importance of "enterprise clouds," where businesses buy insanely as soon as they find that their trusted suppliers have good cloud offerings. The point here is that customers can undermine their reliance on Amazon cloud computing services through "enterprise cloud" products.

Cloud service providers need to understand the motivations of buyers and also understand that many cloud buyers, unlike traditional business buyers, have different needs and goals. Using traditional methods to deal with this new type of buyer does not work.

Cloud computing will bring more convenience to enterprise developers

In 2013, companies will realize that developers deploy public clouds because of their speed and agility. Enterprise IT departments will find that the internal cloud must meet developers' higher expectations than the public cloud, but providing the virtualized environment is not enough, but the internal cloud to achieve the public cloud flexibility requires process simplification and End-to-end automation.

If an enterprise is deploying private clouds without knowing how to integrate end-to-end automation and solving process barriers, it's going to be a big deal.

3. Public CSP business will face price war

The price war between Google and Amazon is only for warming up in 2013. As telecoms operators (CSPs) try to undercut Amazon's growth, we will see a more intense price war next year. Even those suppliers that have avoided price competition will have no choice but to fight. The price war will show who is the heavyweight player in the cloud computing market. For the cloud provider, this price war will be extremely difficult, efficient design, low-cost operations and high utilization are the cornerstone of success. For the client, this will be good news.

4. Hybrid clouds and heterogeneous clouds will surface

Next year we will find the fact that companies will never rely solely on a single cloud technology or vendor. Enterprises are complex heterogeneous technical environment, inevitably require a variety of technologies. And many IT companies and CSPs want the world to be unified on a single technology, but that's not possible.

The mission of Enterprise IT in 2013 was to deploy a management framework that spans across all active cloud environments. Key requirements include: Unified identity management, monitoring, management platform, etc., to control all cloud environments.

5. Cloud spending management becomes more important

Typical enterprise system management ignores the problem of utilization, which brings a heavy financial burden to the current cloud world. In 2013, cloud spend management solutions will become even more important, tracking the money you spend, identifying under-utilized servers and giving you advice on how to save money. These systems do not help you to run applications flexibly for different needs (this is cloud management software's work), but they can help you ensure that you are not wasting money on unnecessary servers or unwise spending plans.

Overall, 2013 will be a year of transition and change

We are moving away from the traditional static computing environment to the flexible environment of the new situation. Each new platform can solve the shortcomings of the previous generation platform, and each new platform will also bring its own shortcomings. Cloud computing is no exception, it is powerful and innovative, but it also has its own flaws. However, in 2013, we will begin to address these shortcomings of cloud computing (expansion, complexity and changing challenges) really, rather than spinning around the drawbacks of what they call security, compliance and service-level agreements.