Is that a Cloud on The Corizon? Cloud Traffic is Growing and Coming to You Soon! – (CWCS)

The cloud computing industry is worth around $117 billion worldwide, and usage is only going to continue to grow over the next few years. By 2016, two thirds of all computing workloads will be processed on some form of cloud server.

In terms of raw data, Western Europe currently processes 156 Exabytes of data in the cloud per year, and that figure is expected to increase to 1 Zettabyte (1 billion terabytes) by 2016. The cloud is here to stay, are you ready for it?

Not Just for Big Businesses

The concepts behind cloud computing may sound incredibly sophisticated and high tech, but almost every business is using the cloud today without even realizing it. If you back up your data to Dropbox or Skydrive, you are using cloud storage. If you access email through Outlook.com or Gmail, you are using the cloud. If you use Google Docs or Office 365, you are leveraging Software as a Service.

Software as a Service, cloud storage and even cloud based VoIP solutions are saving businesses time and money, and making it easier for employees to work on the move, but the real revolution is cloud app hosting platforms. Systems such as Amazon EC2 allow developers to host their applications in the cloud, and pay only for the storage, memory and processing power that they actually use.

This means that during the development and testing phase, they rent just a small amount of server power, and once their app launches and gains popularity, they can dynamically increase or decrease their server allocation.

Not only does this save small companies money, by removing the need to deploy servers that are more powerful than necessary during the early stages of the project, it also improves the end-user experience. If an app is more popular than expected, or has a sudden peak in user figures, then the cloud platform will simply dynamically allocate more resources to keep it running smoothly.

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The Cloud for Enterprise

Enterprise IT departments are embracing cloud computing too. Platform and Infrastructure as a Service solutions contribute to more than half of the growth in the cloud sector, and enterprise cloud computing budgets are increasing steadily, as companies choose to move more and more of their computing tools into the cloud.

Until recently, adoption of cloud services has been relatively slow in the enterprise space, with the main barriers to adoption being security concerns and worries about the ease of migration.

Those barriers to adoption have been addressed by a handful of large suppliers. According to a report published by Market Monitor, the top twelve suppliers dominate the cloud industry, making more than $75m revenue each. Meanwhile, 83% of cloud service providers bring in $15m revenue or less.

The leading suppliers have successfully addressed security, reliability and migration concerns, and have removed much of the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with moving business-critical data to the cloud. In the long term, migrating to the cloud reduces deployment, support and maintenance workloads, and makes managing large teams of employees much easier.

Giving up some control over the handling of your data can be a scary proposition, but the benefits of moving to the cloud are numerous. Rushing into a cloud services deployment would be a bad idea, but next time you need to upgrade your infrastructure, take some time to examine cloud offerings.

You may be surprised at how easy it is to move your data online, and how much smoother it makes your workflow.

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