BANGALORE, INDIA: The buzz in the air can no longer be ignored. Data is moving into the cloud.

As cloud computing continues its growth spurt into maturity, 2010 will prove a coming-of-age year for cloud storage and its corollary techniques like storage virtualization.

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The economic crisis may have receded in the rear view mirror but the bumpy road ahead warrants that organizations place emphasis on containing capital expenditure and operating costs.

Moving to a cloud model can offer distinct benefits of pay-per-use, easy and fast deployments to the end-user even as concerns of security, availability and performance will nudge companies to innovate.

From an adoption standpoint, collaboration applications, web applications and services and data back-up or archive services are the top reasons why users will leverage cloud computing.

But users will also demand more from cloud vendors including competitive pricing, SLAs and the option to move cloud offerings back on premises.

The handful of vendors notwithstanding, the IDC estimated the IT Cloud Services market to be around $17.4B in 2009 and forecasts it to reach $44.2B by 2013. Storage comprises approximately nine percent of the market for now, but is slated to move up to 14 percent by 2013.

In 2010, with its increasing maturity, the cloud computing space will start to see the development of some standards. Amongst other things, standardization will promote interoperability, the lack of which has thus far been an inhibitor.

Once these standards are in place, a lot more players will start adopting this technology. Microsoft will seal its position in this space, as evident from the interest that Azure and Microsoft Web Apps are generating.

Google has already arrived in this area and will continue to build on its strengths. Others like VMware will not be left far behind. As cloud computing proliferates, larger providers will be equally vigorous in acquisitions as in providing services, thereby expanding their footprint inorganically.

Increased market value would follow such a trend. Hence, venture capitalists will be inclined to fund more start-ups – organizations that are generally more innovative and spawn new sub-trends.

All this activity will only add to the load that the current cloud infrastructure carries, and a few outages, here and there, could be expected. Hence, it is equally important for infrastructure providers to be ahead of the game.

A part of the trend is the adoption of private cloud storage by enterprises. The existing storage infrastructure behind virtualized servers is not adequate and likely to fail. private cloud storage is a possible solution as it will eliminate the SAN bottleneck and automate provisioning, configuration, management and recovery across the compute and storage tier.

2010 will also see hardware commoditization. Cloud storage will displace legacy storage as it gives the user choice and is inexpensive, highly scalable and easy to manage. Soon, we may see another data storage layer emerging which would be capable of holding multiple kinds of data, optimizing for performance and cost and supporting large scale data analytics.

Simultaneously, the layer would also eliminate unnecessary data migration and administrative tasks.

That Storage will be served via the cloud seems to be a foregone conclusion. But the multiple ways in which 2010 will unroll as the year of implementation vis-à-vis cloud computing and cloud storage is what will make it truly exciting. 

The author is Senior Vice President at Symphony Service Corp.