Cloud computing trends impacting business strategies

Category: Technology Updates

Businesses looking to remain competitive with rival firms will need to monitor the cloud computing market and its trends to ensure they don't miss any costly opportunities. Although the cloud has been widely adopted and will likely continue to be used for some time, its total depth and penetration is uncertain, according to a new report by Gartner.

"The trend [of adopting cloud] and related technologies [continues] to evolve and change rapidly and there is continuing confusion and misunderstanding as vendors increasingly hype 'cloud' as a marketing term," Gartner vice president David Smith said. "This level of impact, confusion, uncertainty and change make cloud computing one of Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends to address."

IT initiatives should become cloud-centric in design, Gartner noted. In other words, decision-makers may benefit financially from migrating legacy services to the hosted environments instead of implementing new solutions. However, applications designed with the cloud in mind will offer the technology's full potential.

Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, can benefit from the cloud's scalability and mobile capabilities. As a result, the number of SMBs paying for the cloud will triple by 2015, according to an Edge Technologies study.