Cloud Computing Trends

Cloud adoption is rapidly increasing. Companies are moving more and more towards adopting applications to run their business where the application is not run on their computers, but is run as a hosted service deployed in the cloud. Many organizations see the economic benefits of not having to maintain their own IT infrastructure specifically real time storage, availability, 24x7 support and backups. This is one of the touted benefits of Software as a Service, your company no longer needs to think about managing IT infrastructure. The IT department doesn’t need to be thinking tactically about how to keep the business going, instead they can begin to think strategically about where the business needs to go from a technology standpoint. However, even as companies move more and more of their computing to Cloud based applications, they are still wary of losing their critical business data and about controlling security across all of their applications. While cloud application adoption can free up IT departments to think more strategically then simply cannot ignore the day to day technology operations of their company.

One trend that I see emerging is the need to back up the data and files stored in these cloud based applications. Most "cloud backup" companies provide the functionality to back up a PC or a datacenter server and store the data in the cloud for you to access at anytime and from anywhere. I see that there is a need to go the opposite way, i.e.. take my data out of the cloud and let me keep my own copy of it, maybe even integrate it into my existing backup processes. It is true that most large cloud application providers like Salesforce can likely do a much better job of managing a datacenter than the average small or mid size business, but even the big guys can screw this up (Look at the TMobile/Microsoft Danger disaster). Not to mention that the majority of cloud applications out there are actually hosting their applications on cloud infrastructure that they do not own, thus essentially outsourcing all of their own IT. The cloud applications that you are using likely have many more layers involved and so getting data restored in the event of a disaster may not be as simple as calling up your vendor.

I’m not trying to be gloom and doom over here, but there are certainly things to think about as you move to adopting cloud based applications. The issues can all be overcome quite easily and the benefits to cloud applications do far outweigh traditional software in many situations. Be brave about adopting cloud applications, but be diligent to control the data that is important to your business.