Top 10 trends to watch out in cloud computing

MUMBAI, INDIA: Cloud computing is more than just a buzzword. It's a mega-trend that has become a term for the ongoing shift from in-house data centers to third-party facilities. Within that mega-trend are many smaller trends, which have brought revolution in the IT industry and its operations.

Cloud computing continues to be adopted in its various forms, it is constantly adapting to the changing needs of businesses and providers. While organizations search for a long-term strategy to combine their internal system with the cloud, providers continue to offer greater benefits.

Gartner says cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016. In recent days the adoption of cloud computing in an IT industry has increased significantly. Whether it's public, private or hybrid services, the promise of greater flexibility, scalability and cost-effective pricing models has been too enticing for many businesses to ignore them. The top 10 trends in cloud computing for 2014 are listed below.

Trends in Cloud Computing

Single management console for private and public cloud

One important aspect of cloud computing that will soon make it big is the use of single management console for both onpremise private cloud, as well as off-premise public cloud. This will provide users to work on data from one cloud service, allow to manipulate and convert it and store it in another cloud service all in one step.

More specifically, organizations need to implement a cloud management console that adopts a methodology for developing a risk- and- opportunity-focused security and information assurance architecture that can be mapped to critical business initiatives.

Hybrid cloud security compliance

The hybrid cloud concept introduces new architecture considerations such as data migration, multi-cloud management, and distributed security

models, it also presents new possibilities where security is concerned. Another key benefit of the hybrid cloud approach is the flexibility it offers.

Companies wanting to capitalize on the benefits of both the private and public cloud approach are turning to a flexible hybrid cloud model. The hybrid approach allows businesses to take advantage of the scalability and

cost-effectiveness.

Hybrid cloud offerings where service providers are responsible for the infrastructure, companies can find themselves ahead of the security curve by leveraging the physical infrastructure, security controls, and security expertise offered by the cloud service provider. Leading cloud providers possess more security expertise and make use of more current technology to adequately protect the data and applications that reside on their

infrastructures.

Cloud providers can bring value by making it easier for organizations to understand how their applications are being attacked by current threats and can even offer firewalls as part of their service. The cloud provider can integrate employee and contractor directories with access control policies, for a centralized and comprehensive approach to managing access to

systems in the cloud.

Also important, data thefts sometimes involve employees stealing hard

drives, so housing data offsite at a hybrid cloud provider's facilities eliminates this potential risk.

The growing rate of hybrid cloud adoption requires particulr models of cloud security. Many enterprises are moving some of their workload to a public cloud environment while retaining other workloads in the private cloud. Transitional cloud security strategies are needed that continue to make use of existing data centers and security strategies.

There is only one best practice for securing data in the cloud with systems that involve multiple private and public locations: encrypt the data in a way that allows all systems to continue working transparently and to maintain ownership of the data through ownership of the encryption keys.

Multi tenancy

Multi tenancy and shared infrastructure will become more popular as cloud

computing will gain more acceptance as a business strategy to grow. Multi tenancy on a public cloud can give businesses of any size a greater control on the cost and deploy infrastructure capacity on demand for situations such as seasonal spikes.

Although, single handed servers are considered to have the highest form of security, multi tenancy enjoys enterprise-class security with shared firewalls with dedicated VLANs. Securing enterprise level storage is also possible at such cost effective manner without draining a huge investment from the company to acquire physical servers.

Moving data, apps from private cloud to private cloud

The private cloud is a new style of computing in which corporate IT infrastructure is available as a ubiquitous, easily accessible, and reliable utility service. Private clouds serve many types of users in a variety of business settings: corporate and division offices, business partners, raw-material suppliers, resellers, distributors, and production and supply-chain entities.

In contrast to external clouds, private clouds-enterprise IT infrastructure services, managed by the business, with cloud computing qualities such as self-service, pay-as-you-go charge-back, on-demand provisioning, and the appearance of infinite scalability provide a critical benefit: trust.

Initially, most private clouds will be made up almost entirely of internal resources. A private cloud can combine both external and internal cloud resources to meet the needs of an application system, and that combination, which is totally under enterprise control using unified management, can change moment by moment.

With a private cloud, enterprises can run processes internally and externally, having established the private cloud as the control point for workloads. With control through a unified management tool and a user-centric view, the private cloud thus enables IT to make the best decisions whether to use internal or external resources, or both. It allows that decision to be made on a real-time basis to meet user service needs.

Fast allocation of infrastructure, resources

Another fast emerging trend in cloud computing is fast allocation of resources; which otherwise takes weeks to implement and configure services. In cloud computing, this can be a matter of only few hours with the help of the cloud service provider. It is one of the crucial aspects for the business with respect to reaction to any change.

Consolidation of data centers

Many businesses have already undertaken some level of consolidation or virtualization, there is often potential to extend the benefits across much

more of their IT infrastructure. The increasing complexity in business have made IT to stay ahead of new challenges, boost performance, introduce additional services, and improve availability-while also cutting acquisition and operating costs.

Without flexible IT systems, businesses won't be as agile or efficient as they need to be and IT costs will continue to increase. Thus, consolidation and virtualization not only provide a range of advantages, but they also help businesses to move towards realizing the additional cost savings and agility improvements that cloud computing offers.

Creation of multiple virtual datacenters and manage them by single management tool

Creation of multiple virtual data centers help to build a powerful cloud-based infrastructure. But, beyond the actual virtual machines, the virtualized technology gets organization closer to a cloud-based mindset, making the migration all the more easy.

Migrating datacenter to public cloud

The increased security and scalability requirement are attracting more number of users as a ROI strategy that provides organization with an

option to customize according to individual business need. Though there are few prime concerns in cloud migration when it comes to performance and application compatibility, with good internet bandwidth high performance can be achieved.

This allows the cloud to work very closely with virtualization and helps in creating simpler platform for application compatibility.

Bridging private and public cloud

This provides efficient workload relocation and an evolutionary path to more cost-effective IT operations. This also help in optimizing the IT

environment, enabling a consistent performance and better handling of critical and noncritical data by private and public cloud respectively.

With the emerging nature of cloud computing technology, IT managers must work with developers and business managers to ensure that development platforms, management controls and compliance issues are aligned between the private and public platforms in order to reap these benefits.

Smooth migration toward hybrid cloud

The smooth migration towards hybrid cloud enables enterprises to retain control of their IT environments. Hybrid cloud model is proving itself as the final destination for enterprise IT. Hybrid cloud allows in sending non-mission-critical workloads to the public cloud to leverage flexibility and scalability. This can also solve many cloud risks by introducing cloud bursting and disaster recovery in what may be a more effective manner.

The author is CEO at Syndrome.