Cloud Computing Expectations in 2013

The new year will have cloud computing moving IT from on-premise to off-premise, getting a bigger slice of business spending and improving its security perceptions,  according to analysts.

With cloud computing maturing this year, more organizations will start to move their IT infrastructure from on-premise to off-premise, according to IDC head of research Matthew Oostveen.

“2012 was the year that we all got tired of cloud; there’s cloud fatigue,” he said, according to an article in ComputerworldUK.com.

“What is certain is we are watching a migration taking place where on-premise computing is moving to off-premise computing. It may start incrementally where we see an up take of co-location services, and obviously the co-locations services are being supported by the influx of new data centers in the market place.”

One issue that will remain in 2013 is the expectation of security in the cloud. Security remains a chief inhibitor to enterprise adoption of cloud computing resources, and one Gartner analyst says the biggest concern should not be that data could be compromised in the cloud, but rather that there may be a cloud outage that could lead to data loss.

There’s a perception, says Gartner cloud security analyst Jay Heiser, that the most significant risk in using the cloud is that sensitive data can be leaked. But there’s been little evidence of that, he says.

But more common nowadays are cloud outages and data loss, and Heiser says many enterprises are ill-prepared for those incidents.

Telsyte senior analyst Rodney Gedda’s predictions are similar to IDC’s Oostveen’s. “Cloud computing [services] will mature next year and continue to be procured as a replacement to on-premise infrastructure and as an option for service delivery,” Gedda said.

He said there will be more innovation in application testing and development in 2013, with new cloud applications coming out to market.

“We can expect to see new types of applications delivered out of the cloud, more options for where data is hosted (and the type of infrastructure its hosted on) and more services offering enterprise-grade application hosting.

“We can also expect to see very strong enterprise-grade services coming out to market,” according to Deloitte Consulting technology leader Robert Hillard.

“File sharing, document sharing, collaboration will very quickly gain enterprise strength and much greater support within the enterprise traditional governance,” he said.

Patrick Burke is a writer and editor based in the greater New York area and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.