It's that time of year already, when we take stock and think of what's in store for the coming year. So here we go. Over the next few weeks, we will share what we believe will be the top 5 trends and technologies for 2012.
“Private clouds” will be exposed as old-fashioned hosting masquerading under a new name
Vendors have muddied the “cloud” waters by rebranding hosting services and traditional data-centre managed services as “private clouds”. As more organisations begin evaluating and using cloud-based applications, and report back on their experiences, the significant differences between public cloud solutions like Google Apps, hybrid cloud applications such as Office 365 and “private clouds” will be laid bare.
During 2012, we expect to see more discussion on how the underlying architecture affects a range of issues, such as the speed at which services can be scaled up and down, the impact on users of an outage at a particular data center, where data is held and how it is secured, and what hardware and software users need to make use of the service.
The net result will be that it will become much clearer during the coming year what companies are really buying when they choose a “private cloud” or hybrid cloud, and that these services don’t offer the resilience, flexibility, affordability and mobility benefits of true “public cloud” services.
