The year 2013 may see a further explosion in cloud, with those providing security to be the main players in the IT industry, technology researcher Gartner predicts.
Gartner says that the resurgence of a number of private haphazard in-house cloud services by various organisations will dwindle, favouring strategic hybrid mixes of public cloud services and more commercially packaged private clouds.
Gartner’s principal research analyst Tracy Corbo says enterprises will shift away from private cloud, especially where data does not pose “too much risk” in case of loss or outage. High risk data will however remain in private clouds.
Corbo foresees a hybrid cloud that has a mix of both the public and private models. She says she is convinced 2013 is going to be the year of the hybrid cloud infrastructure.
“Cloud infrastructure outages happen. That’s a fact that is not going to change. So it only makes sense for an enterprise to take a look at the workloads they can put in the public cloud where there lies the bigger risk of outage and data loss and those that should be placed on a more controlled private cloud,” Corbo said.
The hybrid infrastructure is further expected to be split, with one side dealing with systems of engagement and system of record. The systems of engagement would deal with activities such as customer care, while systems of record will serve activity like back-end financials, explains Chandar Pattabhiram, the vice president of marketing at Badgeville, a company specialising in cloud for the gaming industry.
According to Gartner, public infrastructure as a service in cloud computing will remain an area of expertise for a selected few, such as Amazon, although it will face competition from vendors, especially those with strong ties to vending for the enterprise market such as HP.
Vice president at Cloud Technology Partners John Treadway said: “It’s very hard to play in the Amazon game. The margins are small and if you don’t offer a differentiating value, you are very likely going to fail.”
It is also predicted that the increased use of hybrid cloud will force industry players to invest more to ensure that their services remain efficient. The research firm challenges the industry to think of managing the service even as provision of infrastructure continues.
According to IDS, the success of cloud systems management lies in provision of a wide range of capabilities, beyond service portals and automation, able to support heterogeneous hypervisor and hardware platforms
Unlike in service provision, which will remain a playing field of a few companies, cloud brokerage and integration hubs are expected to increase exponentially. Cloud brokerages will be necessary for integrating the systems, while integration hubs deal with security concerns and auditing of the processes.
Big data analytic tools are also predicted to get better, software-defined networking will turn to just networking, and Gamification will continue to drive sales and customer service with many companies applying the gaming theory although the model could also be at risk if not modified to suit the business risks in future.
