Increasingly, businesses of all sizes are learning about the benefits of cloud computing and cloud applications and services. But this isn’t just idle talk; companies are actually migrating to the cloud at record rates and enterprise cloud application deployment is on a major upswing.
A recent Network World (News - Alert) article stresses that knowledge is a significant factor in this trend. While most companies have at least heard about the cloud, many failed to become fully informed of its benefits and advantages until fairly recently. According to research from IDC (News - Alert), more than 80 percent of Net-new applications will be deployed specifically for cloud-based distribution by the end of this year. That forecast is significant, and the company goes on to predict that cloud platforms will gradually displace the client/server model as the main mode of application deployment and delivery.
Make no mistake, the cloud offers significant advantages, particularly for organizations with overworked and over-taxed IT departments. Cloud applications and services can assume many of the routine and mundane IT monitoring and management tasks that take up much of the time of IT staff. And the public cloud is no longer the only game in town for connecting to cloud resources, with secure and scalable private and hybrid cloud networks becoming more and more prevalent.
Companies that were previously hesitant to embrace the cloud because of safety and performance issues can take advantage of third-party cloud infrastructure that acts as an extension of their VPNs, setting up private or hybrid clouds. That means that workloads previously running in enterprise data centers may now be offloaded to the cloud securely and efficiently, for easy and quick access from any location.
Of course, choosing the correct cloud service provider and setup to meet the specific needs of your organization requires due diligence on the part of you, the customer. Companies need to educate themselves on providers’ compute, storage and data center networking capabilities and policies as well as the breadth and depth of their service portfolios. Most importantly, customers should make sure providers offer sound communications solutions as well as high levels of security and application management.