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Top 5 Cloud Computing Trends

Clearly IT will be changed forever by cloud computing. Large enterprises and SMBs are adopting cloud computing technology at an exponential rate. But beyond that confusion often reigns over just what the cloud trends are and over the best strategies for businesses. And the number of people writing about this in the blogosphere often creates confusion rather than clarification. Should your cloud strategy be public, private or hybrid? Should you choose IaaS, SaaS or PaaS?

In past articles I have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each cloud technology and how cloud computing is impacting the IT environment. But what are the top five cloud computing trends?

1. The IT infrastructure will be crucially transformed and new skills will be needed, pushing IT staff to adjust. The need for IT support will be reduced, but people will need to understand how to integrate the newest technologies in their companies and manage the cloud vendors.
2. Cloud security will no longer be an issue. This is related directly to the first point, as IT professionals discover the fact that the managed cloud can be more secure than a physical environment managed by your IT staff, who are also responsible for many IT projects.
3. Custom cloud computing services -- SaaS, PaaS and IaaS -- are growing in prominence, and companies are often challenged to understand when to use which kind of cloud service. Outsourced IT organizations will concentrate on automating very specific migrations and become the experts in those types of migrations. An example is outsourcing your Microsoft Exchange environment. This is one of the most painful cloud migrations, and IT service providers focus just on this type of migration, offering services and automated software to make sure the migration is smooth and painless.
4. Custom software development will shift towards the cloud. Legacy software applications need to be refactored to run more efficiently on cloud environments. This will increase software development, and outsourcing will experience a boom.
5. Innovation – probably the most important trend -- will drive down cloud computing costs, increase security, and help with migration from physical to cloud. And this innovation will eliminate many reasons for not migrating to the cloud.

I also believe that an alignment of standards is necessary. Organizations such as The Green Grid and Cloud Security Alliance are working on this, but the industry really needs a comprehensive guide/entity to which most cloud providers adhere.

All in all, I believe that more businesses to will get over the fear of embracing cloud computing as IT directors start to fully understand how their businesses could benefit from this new technology. I am expecting an even wider cloud adoption with a more accelerated increase.

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