Five Cloud Trends That Will Impact Your Business

Shifting Clouds

It's no secret that cloud computing is transforming the technology landscape.

The notion of shifting all or part of a company's IT resources to a cloud provider is forcing CTOs around the country to re-examine their IT shops.

Research firm Gartner has taken a look at the market to determine five key trends in the cloud marketplace.

Continue on to see what's taking place in the cloud right now.

Cloud Activity Shifting To Higher Value

As the cloud model takes hold, it promises to offer higher-value business activities, lower costs and more innovation, according to Gartner. However, as the cloud model matures, issues will arise over security, availability, integration and vendor lock-in.

These factors create a complex cloud environment and will make it difficult to judge individual clouds.

Hybrid Clouds Gain Traction

Businesses are taking advantage of the cloud in varying forms. They may be using public cloud services, private clouds, or a mixture of both along with some on-premise computing. Eventually, companies may adopt a hybrid mixture of all three, depending on their changing business requirements.

Companies should first consider using a hybrid solution to link internal and external applications, according to Gartner.

Importance Of Cloud Brokers Will Grow

Companies will need help migrating IT resources to the cloud, so demand for cloud services brokerages will increase.

IT departments should consider becoming cloud services brokerages themselves, according to the research firm, by setting up a purchasing process for cloud adoption so that business units will look to them for support.

An enterprise cloud services brokerage can take advantage of existing processes and tools such as internal portals and service catalogs.

Design For The Cloud

Businesses should look beyond merely moving enterprise workloads to the cloud and instead to the development of apps optimized for the cloud.

Such an approach would take advantage of the special characteristics, opportunities and limitations of a cloud model.

Data Center Development Will Be Influenced By The Cloud

Enterprises today use the data center services of public cloud providers. But in the future, they will adopt these models for their own data centers and related services to increase their efficiency and agility, according to Gartner.

More Cloud Coverage From CRN

The Latest In Cloud News
Salesforce.com Seeks To Tackle Government Cloud
Google Drive Launched With Free Cloud Storage
Adobe Launches Software Suite In Its Creative Cloud