In 2013, IT dollars will be flowing toward cloud computing technology, as well as outsourced services, as administrators and CIOs look to trim or hold budgets in line, while taking advantage of technologies such as software-as-a-service (SaaS).
The fact that cloud computing remains a hot area for IT investment should come as no surprise to those watching industry trends. In its first-ever poll, Where to Spend?, Enterprise Conversation found that nearly 27 percent of IT professionals plan to spend their dollars in cloud and other outsourced services starting in January.
The attitude about spending in 2013 is backed up by Gartner, which forecasts that the public cloud services market will grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide . Within this market, Gartner’s Sept. 18 forecast found that SaaS would grow to more than $14 billion this year, while infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will grow to $6.2 billion by year’s end.
After cloud computing, security and application software tied for second as priorities for IT departments in the new year. Of those surveyed, 15 percent of readers said these two areas were ripe for investment in 2013. This is understandable, considering the number of data breaches that made headlines in 2012, as well as issues related to compliance and government regulations.
Other areas that readers found important included network management and server virtualization. Of all those surveyed, 11.5 percent said these two topics are areas that they will pour money into next year. Of the remaining readers, about 7.7 percent found network infrastructure as a priority for 2013.
With the push to build out infrastructures to support cloud-based applications and other technologies, readers found that management technologies and server virtualization are top priorities to help get a better handle on their datacenters and make the most use of their current technologies.
I could not say if it good or bad dependency on Amazon it just when you have healthy competition you have more option and better prices - sometimes :), but only with time we will know if it good or bad :)
batye, is all that dependency on Amazon bad? We have other industries where there are sole service providers during the initial phases and usually these are the ones' that eventually become the market leaders.
Scott, if you are a small business and completely dependent on Amazon for your infrastructure than I believe you must inevitably face downtime. The question is how much do you lose for every second of downtime? If small firms can manage during the break downs with manual or traditional software than they would continue with the cloud based solutions. Else they might consider switching to traditional in house infrastructure.
yes, but it all related to Amazon selling it cloud via sub-providers and it create hard dependency on Amazon - so to say... until over big SaaS/Cloud players decide to compete with Amazon...
@Scott, as a knowledge expert who talks to both SMEs and mid-range companies, I always begin by asking them this question - show me your failure records before you moved to cloud. In other words, before you moved to Amazon and was housing and running your IT services in-houe, can you show you your uptime. Nearly all that kept records perform worse than Amazon. Of course when you pay for things and someone is doing it, you will expect the problem to go away. That is the human nature.
There is no person that can promise 100%. However, I am not aware of any company that delivers what Amazon has. It gets bad press but the alternative is not better in terms of cost and service. The only guarantee is that you can shout at your staff to get the server up when it is Amazon, you send annoying emails or call on phone. On bad days, they will not even pick the calls and everyone is frustrated. But when it comes to business, cloud is simply unbeatable. That is what data shows and that is what market responds to. If you are on cloud, you can focus on your business, deliver services cheaper and be more competitive.
And remember, I am not aware of any free email that is not on cloud. Since 1995, we have been on cloud and we need to get used to some of these issues on uptime. The #1 rule - always assume that things will go bad and have a mini-strategy to serve at least you key customer. That is why some companies do cloud visualization where at the end of the day, you synchronize with two services so that if one goes down, you will be good.
Before we can answer where the dollars are going, we first need to catch up with the changing definitions of various cloud services. The most prevalent example of this is the whole concept of "private cloud" which is no longer the equivalent of IaaS. Now that Microsoft has computed the mix of on-prem licensing revenue they require versus subscription cloud services they've announced that Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 provide the "Cloud OS". Welcome back to license land.
Looks like the NIST definition of cloud will be the arbiter of what we consider cloud. Elasticity, self-service, the layer of abstraction between the user and the technology, these define cloud now, not physical separation.
So when we ask where our IT dollars are going, hardware is once again an option!
What gives me concern is that these outages seem to occur a lot. Every time Amazon EC2 goes down, it creates major headlines and what happens if you are a small business dependent on Amazon for your infrastructure?
Keith, the cloud is in its early stages but it has already been put to a lot of questioning. Fortunately, no major disaster has been observed but I think even if something bad occurs it will not impact its future potential. All technologies are prone to disasters. The ones that flourish are those that evolve and do not repeat their mistakes.
When it comes to software-defined networking, IT still has a lot of questions about what the technology and where the benefits are for the network. A recent survey shows that while network and IT admins are concerned about SDN, they are also intrigued.
The latest Enterprise Conversation poll finds that most IT professionals are saying no thanks to Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system right now. However, some are actively testing.
Oracle announced another acquisition within the telecommunications space. The software giant agreed to buy Tekelec, a provider of network signaling, policy control, and subscriber management tools. The lines between telecom and IT are getting blurry.
While security has been the traditional purview of the IT department, and perhaps the CIO, the full executive suite is now expected to have a better handle on the various threats that face a company. Otherwise, it could spell trouble.
The market for high-performance computers, especially large supercomputer systems, is continuing to grow, showing that research facilities and businesses have an even greater need for networking and computing power.
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