Edging Toward the Cloud Future

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• While the majority of public and private sector organizations are employing cloud services to support at least a percentage of their IT needs, more conventional approaches to technology still dominate.
• Although questions about service stability, security, and compliance remain, maturing delivery models and some promising partnerships could signify the start of a more productive phase in cloud computing.

It is the season to take stock of the year gone by and look forward to the one ahead, trying to anticipate what is on the horizon.  With respect to the cloud, we have seen both forward momentum and some unfortunate backsliding.  Arguments and challenges remain around all of the issues that have been the steepest obstacles to entry: stability, security, compliance, complexity, and to some extent, cost.  Outages, breaches, the lack of common standards for effective security, and hesitation over the difficulty and expense of migrating legacy application workloads into an on-demand environment are keeping some organizations on the sidelines – at least for now.