By Eleanor Reader
Analyst firm Ovum has released three trend reports on cloud computing that reveal cloud will continue to grow rapidly in 2013, with data touted as the “new cloud computing oil”.
In the 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing report, Ovum senior analyst Laurent Lachal notes that while cloud is building momentum quickly, it is still early days for vendors and enterprises.
“Cloud computing has barely reached the adolescence phase and it will take at least another five years for cloud computing to mature into adulthood,” said Lachal.
The emergence of a cloud computing ecosystem is also expected in 2013, with public clouds increasingly approached not only as technology delivery platforms but also as “ecosystem hubs” for cloud service providers and consumers.
“It takes a lot of effort from vendors and enterprises to actually make it work, and they will succeed in making it work in 2013, both on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems,” Lachal said.
“They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile solution ecosystems of the Internet age. Some industry sectors are benefiting from the ‘data centre as a hub’, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content.”
Big data is also expected to become a major trend in cloud computing from 2013 onwards.
Cloud computing services, and the applications – often social or mobile – that cloud platforms underpin, generate a lot of data, which in turn requires cloud services and applications to make sense of it.
“From a cloud computing perspective there will be growing interest in the cultural shift required by vendors and enterprises to turn data into a resource to manage and monetise, starting with data abstraction (from underlying IT systems), sharing (within and outside the enterprise), and valuation (via a model from companies such as Accenture),” said Ovum.
Along with big data, this trend fuels other industry trends such as the internet of things, including cloud computing-based smart cities and machine-to-machine communication and data processing; open government data; and consumerisation of IT.
“Some vendors played the cloud data card early, but the cloud data production, brokerage, and consumption ecosystem is still in the making and will continue to evolve over the next five years,” said Lachal.
Ovum’s other cloud focused reports include 2013 Trends to Watch: Private and Public Clouds report, which looks at private and public cloud trends, and 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Services, which examined cloud from the perspective of IT service providers.
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