Cloud may ‘come of age’ in 2012, analyst says

Research group expects a defining 12 months for enterprise ITThis year may well bring about the enterprise Cloud’s coming of age, when traditional IT deployment methods will start to give way to on-demand shared infrastructure. That’s according to analysts from the 451 Group, whose new report attempts to predict key enterprise-IT trends in 2012. Simon Robins, research director at 451, said the coming 12 months will be a “defining period” for enterprise-IT disruption. "Economic concerns will weigh heavily on the minds of IT decision-makers this year, and will increasingly drive customers toward considering cloud-based approaches,” he said. “Indeed, 2012 could be when the cloud comes of age, and for the first time will really begin to nip away at traditional IT deployment models in enterprise environments." The first key finding of the report is that cloud adoption by the enterprise will “move from playground to production” in 2012. IT departments will see aggressive competition from cloud services. As they compete with cloud providers, hardware currently running mission-critical applications will increasingly see competition from virtualized platforms. 451 says virtualization is evolving from being merely a cheap extension of lab and test resources into a production platform for mission-critical apps. On the physical-data-center side, 451 expects modularity to continue to drive the agenda. The analysts expect most new datacenters to employ highly modular designs. They will be tightly integrated and pre-configured before being built or delivered to their locations. Modularity will prove to be a disrupting force for the datacenter supply chain, 451 says. It will force suppliers and service providers to look for new partners and routes to market. Other key trends for 2012 include the increasing drive of the enterprise by mobile apps, more innovation in the systems world, storage efficiency, more software-defined networking, more data, more big data and first signs of maturity in the ecologically-efficient IT space.