The Road Ahead for Cloud Computing: What Does its Future Hold?

It’s true that security and dependability are still of great concern to many IT users, but the last two years have shown tremendous innovation and progress, especially in the ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ realm. Experts believe cloud computing can transform the IT industry from an asset-centric approach to a services-centric approach, and could change IT from on-premise technology to on-demand services. Still not convinced? We’ll let the numbers tell the story.

A recent article in Datamation by Damu Kuttikrishnan caught my attention.  The article titled, “Cloud Computing: The Road Ahead,” highlights trends and predictions from analysts with leading industry research firms such as Forrester, Gartner and IDC. Here are some key stats from a few of the industry reports that I found interesting and wanted to share:

A recent Forrester report “Sizing the Cloud” notes:

• The cloud computing market will rise from $40.7 billion this year to more than $241 billion in 2020, with a year-to-year growth of over 20 percent.
• Estimates tremendous growth in SaaS, with its market size estimated to be over 80 percent of the global public cloud market.

Gartner conducted its latest survey from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in CIO IT spending and covering 38 industries across 50 countries. The survey showed that:

• Only 3 percent of CIOs have more than half of their infrastructure and applications operating in the cloud. However, that number is expected to grow to 46 percent by 2015.
• Gartner predicts that by 2014, worldwide cloud services revenue, both public and private, will reach more than $148 billion.

According to IDC:

• Spending on IT cloud services may reach $4.6 billion by 2014.
• By 2012, nearly 85 percent of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; and by 2014, about 65 percent of new products from ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
• SaaS revenue will account for nearly 26 percent of net new growth in the software market in 2014.

Here at Sendmail, we believe that while finding a solution that takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud, it’s also important for enterprises to address the risks. When it comes to email in the cloud, it is not a cookie-cutter solution, and organizations need to continue to consider both the driver for cloud email as well as the risks.

Source: http://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/cloud-computing-the-road-ahead-1.html