Enterprise Adoption, SLAs, Automation to Drive Cloud in 2011: Report

Datapipe, a provider managed services and infrastructure for IT and cloud computing, issued a report outlining three cloud computing trends for 2011. The company sees major trends for the coming year including the increased adoption to cloud computing by large enterprise organizations, increased market demand and delivery of service-level agreements (SLAs) for guaranteed performance and reliability, and improved automation and governance that moves cloud computing beyond raw infrastructure to solve specific business domain challenges.
While enterprise adoption of cloud computing progressed in 2010, 2011 will be the year when industry giants from across the spectrum-including major financial institutions, pharmaceuticals and retailers-will migrate major internal and external IT systems to the cloud, the report predicted. According to Datapipe research, moving beyond the “dev/test” and “R&D” use cases, more projects will be deployed to include mainstream and mission-critical IT applications and services. “This adoption will be spurred by advancements in security, compliance, and the availability of new managed cloud offerings that enable greater governance, faster adoption and 24x7x365 operations support,” the report noted.
In 2011, Datapipe researchers said they expect to see new products and services that focus not just on general IT needs, but also on opportunities related to specific industries and verticals. As the value chain between cloud providers, ISVs and managed services continues to take shape and evolve, experts in industries such as health care, gaming and financial services will offer new solutions that leverage cloud computing technology to meet the specific IT requirements of these communities, the report predicted.
“What was once considered an unknown technology surrounded by lots of hype is now revolutionizing IT,” said Ed Laczynski, Datapipe’s vice president for cloud strategy and architecture. “The reality is, we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible in the cloud and during 2011 we will see significant advancements that will drive stronger adoption and value from the entire cloud computing ecosystem.”
Laczynski said as the cloud computing delivery model matures, more enterprises will demand the same types of SLAs that they currently rely on from vendors delivering more traditional IT services. Robust SLAs around full solution availability, performance and incident response will allow more customers to trust mission-critical and production-level systems to cloud computing. The growing cloud ecosystem will continue to spawn a new class of products and services that help customers manage and govern SLA compliance, he said.
“It’s clear that new value-added services and technologies will continue to transform cloud computing into a reality for organizations as they look for more efficient, flexible and reliable ways to deliver IT services,” Laczynski noted. “Success breeds success, and we believe innovation will continue to accelerate in 2011, along with the adoption and value of cloud computing to business.”