Cloud computing seems to have changed the way businesses were done earlier. Recent studies have revealed that corporate executives are eager than ever to move their operation to virtualized environment in order to create a more customer centric business.
Even few years back only a fraction of CEOs were keen towards adopting cloud environment as preferred business model. Objections mainly rooted from lack of exposure towards the subject and skepticism surrounding the idea of hosting data to a remote location. But the situation is changing fast with growing number of large and middle enterprises embracing the virtualized model. Some of the reasons triggering the change are:
- Increased competitiveness that requires organizations to depend heavily on innovations
- Growing demand for mobility, portability and accessibility
- The growing trend of BYOD system
The increasing trend of mobile internet use has further made the decision regarding cloud adoption a business decision than a technological one. This emerging trend of “shadow IT spend” is likely to dominate the coming years and is expected to grow by 35% by 2015 according to a study conducted by Gartner.
But all these have also given rise to increasing security concerns in hosted environment. The increasing preference for ‘bring your own device model’ has further complicated the security issues as end users often find ways to subvert the implemented security measures. Possible security breaches can cause great damages to a company in terms of business loss, and rupturing its brand value. It is therefore that IT professionals are more concerned about protecting their data from malicious interventions in virtualized environment.
Although not as severe as the concern for data security data backup and recovery also dominate the scene when it comes to fathom potential treats of cloud computing. IT heads aren’t ignoring the possibilities of severe outage which will cause business to be down for hours or days.
All these fears have culminated to increase the preference for private cloud. The idea of keeping their data safe in a privately owned closed environment quite naturally has greater appeal to IT heads and CIOs. Companies that have or are planning to invest in accentuating their IT infrastructure to support virtualized environment are more in favor of building their own cloud instead of occupying server space at public hosting services.
The concept of hybrid cloud is also gaining prominence amongst corporate. Large and mid-sized businesses are more inclined towards adopting the hybrid model with benefits of both public and on-premise cloud. This model offers flexibility and scalability of a public hosting service while allowing the companies to safeguard critical data within the boundaries of their own firewalls. The hybrid model is likely to dominate the trends by 2015 in commercial adoption of hosted services.
The revenue earning of cloud based service is expected to reach $150 billion by 2014. Another survey conducted by Gartner estimated that about a third of world’s data will be stored in cloud by 2016. As a result, the question today before the corporate isn’t ‘whether they should have virtualization’ but ‘how best they can go about it’. Companies can no longer avoid the flexibility, agility and dynamism that cloud computing can add to their businesses. They may risk losing ground to their competitors if not proactive with adoption and innovation on cloud based technology.
