The State of the Cloud in 2013

Over the past few years there have been many discussions surrounding the concept of cloud computing and its development in both consumer and business market. The cloud has entered its second phase when most of the users are aware of its potential. Still, its growth continues and the experts have more or less similar predictions about its future focus.

Security concerns

While the consumer market has adopted the cloud in its different forms, business users are still concerned about privacy and security issues. The fear of the cloud stems from the fact that a company’s data is stored on remote servers, which means that the CIOs have considerably less control over them. The fact is that the cloud may not be appropriate for each and every business organization. Managers need to carefully examine the possibilities with cloud-based solutions and implement only the mission critical applications that will actually contribute to the company’s progress. Moving too much workload can bring negative results, which is why it is crucial that a company examines its particular needs and expectations.

Mobile computing growth

It is said that mobile devices and the cloud are a match made in heaven for plenty of reasons. The quality of cloud services largely contributes to the development of mobile devices, as it provides them with a better functionality. More and more mobile apps are streamed via the web, which reduces the amount of disk space necessary for running the applications and improves mobile device performance. Also, cloud-based apps provide an access to the same files from different devices, thus enabling a user to perform a larger set of activities from their tablet or smartphone. The trend of adopting both mobile devices and cloud solutions is to grow at a high rate in the next couple of years.

Europe and Asia

Adoption of different cloud services has been a dominant trend in the USA over the last few years, but in other areas this process has been much slower. Europe has been reluctant to adopt the cloud due to the data security issues. Last year, the EU outlined a detailed cloud computing strategy that was supposed to contribute to a wider cloud adoption in all the EU member states. Asian market is to become an attractive location for future cloud investments and China is expected to exceed $100 million this year. Most of the Asian regions are ready for major cloud adoption and these are the places providers are looking at.

Consumer cloud trends

Personal cloud growth is another important trend in the 2013, as almost every kind of cloud based service is getting widely adopted among individual users. Storage and backup applications, cloud games and other streaming services have become reality for most of the internet users. Last year, Gartner predicted that consumer cloud services will be integrated in 90% of all connected devices by the end of this year and this is very likely to come true.

Considering these trends, it is not difficult to predict the future focus of major cloud providers. It is expected that they’ll continue to work on improving their services and making better offers for both business and individual users. The cloud is not the future of computing anymore; it has long become the present for most of us.

Miodrag Kostic is a technivore, blogger, and cloud computing enthusiast. Currently he is closely collaborating with Crucial Cloud Hosting.