Is the cloud here to stay? How will it develop and affect your industry in the next 5 years? Axway has published an Infographic that predicts how the cloud will be implemented and its impact up to 2015. Let’s examine it more closely:
The Cloud Impact and Adoption: Predictions for Today and Tomorrow
As with any new technology or idea, as it moves from the early adopters to mainstream, the barriers or challenges to using it start to drop away. According to the infographic, the definition of a “cloud barrier” is “any obstacle or perceived problem that prohibits cloud adoption by a company, such as a lack of security, support and control, regulatory concerns, and difficulty meetings SLAs.” According to a survey in March 2011, the top barriers to adopting the cloud are as follows:
- Security
- Integration with Internal IT applications
- Performance and Reliability
- Regulatory and Compliance
- Lock-In
- Transparency of Cost
- Geographic Location
From 2009 to 2011, the order of these concerns is similar but overall, the top three have decreased in the past few years.
Axway predicts that in 2012, worldwide spending will surpass $20 billion and the prevalant adoption path is a “private cloud with on-premise or hybrid integration” which they argue is a sign that cloud adoption is moving into the mainstream.
In 2013, the prediction is the focus will be on security. According to Gartner, “By 2016, 40 percent of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service.” They also predict that mobile will be the driving force behind the types of applications enterprises adopt in the cloud. In my own view, this is happening now – companies are already aware that “mobile is king” because all of the executives have a mobile device they use every day.
What is in store for 2014? The prediction is the enterprise buyers will force the industry to adopt SLA standards, including providing management, security, regulatory and disaster recovery services.
Finally, Axway predicts that by 2015, there will be a demand for flexible SaaS licensing models across all different types of software and the main issue will be cloud complexity which will result in new and improved management tools being created and used. Axway specifically predicts that “this issue drives the adoption of cloud brokers to act as intermediaries and solve issues of integration, management and service aggregation.
How do you see the cloud impacting your industry by 2015? See the full infographic below and click to download.
The Cloud: Impact and Adoption – Infographic by Axway.
