03-05-13 | Blog Post
In a recent report from Gartner, they expect the cloud market to surpass the 2012 total of $111 billion, and reach $131 billion in 2013. They also stated that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was again the fastest growing segment, having grown 42.4% in 2012.
The reason for this huge growth? Gartner believes it’s due to cloud services becoming more prevalent in production systems. Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner sees this being the reason for both the bloom of cloud offerings as well as the increased demand:
“The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date…Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers.”
A rise in demand for cloud services makes sense. Cloud hosting doesn’t require as many physical resources and hardware (lowering consistent maintenance costs), and decreases initial capital expenses when initially building the infrastructure- effectively trimming down that bottom line.
On top of the cost benefits, companies can also enjoy the increased flexibility of a cloud. If you need compliance (PCI, HIPAA, SOX) you can help meet it with a secure, private cloud infrastructure. Plus, with ability to spin up a server in just a few minutes, there’s no longer need for the process of trying to guess exactly how much disk space, RAM, or CPU you require. Add more as you have a need for it, and reallocate in an instant.
With a cloud, your disaster recovery option takes your downtime in an emergency from days to mere hours. At that point the virtualization is not only saving you money, it’s saving your company’s reputation, too.
As if all this wasn’t already enough to cause the rampant growth of cloud computing, likely another factor that caused this uptick was increasing confidence in a cloud’s ability to be secure. As I wrote about in an earlier blogpost SaaS Adoption on the Rise, the report claimed that “initial concerns about security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations…”. Many companies may have been initially wary of the technology, but it seems more and more they’re finding that with the correct physical, technical and administrative guards and guidelines, a cloud environment can be appropriately secure.
More Reading:
The Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
Top Five Tips For Cloud Computing Security
Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Spending to Exceed $72 Billion by 2016
