Top 10 Cloud Trends for 2010

1)    Manageability of the cloud is becoming a critical success factor
As different vendors clamor to be part of the cloud, unified management of the entire technology stack is critical.  Whether public or private, tying together the different infrastructure layers including applications, VMs, systems, networks and storage, with a comprehensive set of management tools reduces complexity by providing end to end service visibility, performance monitoring, and automated provisioning.

2)    Natural selection will begin in the cloud service provider space
Although it is still early in evolutionary process, Darwinian selection is already starting to happen in the cloud service provider space.  Super efficient aggregators are emerging who have figured out how to get the most out of a virtualised infrastructure.  Some early adopters of the cloud business model will decide to abandon offering services from their own data centres and partner with these successful service providers who have demonstrated that they can offer enterprise class IT as a Service cheaper and with better service levels than they can do it themselves. 

3)    Secure Multi-Tenancy will become imperative
Data centres today that are deploying a cloud architecture are making a profound shift from application centric silos to virtualised shared infrastructures. This shared environment results in multiple ‘tenants’ or users occupying the same virtualised infrastructure. As a result, the tenants need to be assured that safe sharing occurs both from a security perspective and a performance perspective. A secure multi-tenancy solution enables this.

4)    Companies will need a better grasp of how to standardise, consolidate, and virtualise their IT environments
Most IT departments over time have accumulated a diverse set of hardware and software platforms.  This model may be fine in a siloed structure where each business application has its own server and storage resource. However, in a cloud environment, this model will pose serious challenges. As a result, companies who want to realise a true service-oriented architecture will need to start by planning to standardise and consolidate first, in order to build a shared virtualised infrastructure.

5)    Security and privacy issues will come more into focus
Data security is a challenge today even in closed IT infrastructure environments.  For many financial, military defense,  and public security companies this issue will be even more profound in a shared and open cloud environment.  Cloud Service Providers will need to develop a proven practice to gain the confidence of those wary customers who value data security as the number one criteria in choosing a service provider.

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