IDC Conference In Boston Talks About Cloud Computing Future

More evidence was presented during the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Directions Conference this week in Boston about the rapid adoption of cloud technology. The popular American research, analysis and advisory firm predicts that cloud computing will be estimated at about $107 billion by 2017, more than double of what was projected for 2013, $47 billion.

Rick Villars, the IDC Vice President of data center and cloud, revealed during the event that as compared to the broader technology market, the 23.5 percent compound annual growth of cloud is five times faster.

Villars believes; scale, complexity and speed are three main factors to boost cloud adoption rate.  A scale not possessed by most regular businesses is provided by cloud, resulting in massive improvements in services.

According to the technology guru, the revolution in mobile devices has been a major impetus behind the ever-increasing need of cloud computing as every new mobile device requires a data center. As a result, companies such as Google, Verizon and others have built massive data centers to cater millions of users.

From the start of this century, we have witnessed a number of revolutions in mobile technology, with the introduction of smartphones being one of the latest. Villars thinks, the next revolution is just around the corner in shape of wearable technology, Internet of Things (IoT) and connected devices.

While Samsung has already introduced a few versions of its Galaxy Gear, Google and other technology giants are geared up to launch wearable gadgets in the future. In the next few years, these devices will become common around the globe, thus service providers will need more data centers to serve their customers efficiently. The only way to deal with this challenge is to adopt cloud computing, in the views of Villars.

IDC and its Vice President believe that some smaller data centers will be made in future as more connected devices will proliferate and service providers will have to make sure that the data centers are closer to the end devices. Such data centers will be extremely modularized, allowing owners to enhance their storage capacity whenever required.

The predicted changes, in Villars’ opinion, will also leave a strong impact on the end users because they will be the eventual beneficiaries of the maturity of cloud service providers. While evaluating cloud services, Villars wants users to adopt an ‘asset management’ approach.

He further added, businesses in the changing environment will have either fixed or liquid IT assets. Assets that can be outsourced to a cloud provider, which possesses bigger scale and infrastructure, are liquid assets; whereas, fixed assets are critical applications that cannot be subcontracted to a cloud service provider. Villars strongly feels that the lesser IT resources a company has to operate itself, the greater chance it has to achieve success and that is how the cloud computing industry will flourish in the coming years.

With new competition in the cloud market, the prices are coming down constantly and it is already encouraging organizations to embrace cloud computing. If you are still ignoring cloud technology, it’s time for you to give it a second thought.