Forrester analyst James Staten has compiled his list of ten cloud computing (or, more specifically, infrastructure-as-a-service) predictions for 2011. Staten sees hosted private clouds and community clouds being increasingly important, cloud computing costs being driven down, and a widening gap between those that take advantage of cloud computing and those that don’t. IaaS is one of the 15 technologies listed in the Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch_2011 To 2013 report released last month, and this blog post by Staten drills deeper into the subject.
- And The Empowered Shall Lead Us
- You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. And this is a good thing.
- Hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1
- Community clouds will arrive, thank to compliance
- Workstation applications will bring HPC to the masses
- Cloud economics gets switched on. Being cheap is good
- The BI gap will widen
- Information is power and a new profit center
- Cloud standards still won’t be here — get over it
- Cloud security will be proven but not by the providers alone
That first one is a reference to Forrester’s empowerment meme. I’ve got mixed feelings about this concept, but I do think that *-as-a-service will continue to be disruptive and change the way IT departments operate.
Staten emphasizes that as IaaS becomes commoditized, tools that help customers compare costs of different providers and optimize spending will be increasingly helpful. Cloud computing marketplaces such as SpotCloud are leading the way.
I’m interested in ways for IT to become a profit center, so I find prediction eight particularly interesting. Staten suggests that companies will increasingly take advantage of services such as Windows Azure DataMarket to sell data. That’s probably more practical for most companies than going the Amazon route and becoming an IaaS provider.
