During the Gartner Data Center Conference, Thomas Bittman who is Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner held a keynote on cloud computing, Data Center Knowledge reports.
During the keynote he mentioned that cloud computing will give rise to hundreds and even thousands of providers, resulting in a competitive environment in which some players will fail, perhaps even large providers.
This is especially important to reckon with for enterprise customers, who are about to chart a path to the cloud. Those customers should have a failover option in case of major downtime, or the cloud provider going out of business.
“We’ve heard all the hype,” he said. “We’ve been hearing that we’re all going to move our stuff to a small number of data centers n the sky, and you’ll all be out of business. In reality, there is not a black or white, public or private. In all of this, there’s shades of grey. There are good sides and bad sides to cloud computing. The key is to focus on the right services and requirements.”
Beside that Bittman sees specialized clouds arising due to specific security and compliancy requirements in specific industries and markets. He also mentioned upcoming Community Clouds forged around shared challenges or requirements, like pharmaceutical companies working together to maintain a cloud service optimized for high performance computing.
Also so called Cloud Brokers, who act as a intermediary between enterprise customers and cloud providers will grow, estimating that around 2015 20% of all cloud computing capacity will be handled by brokers.
“We think what’s important is for you to stratify your requirements,” said Bittman. “Every service should have a strategic plan. Some will be hybrd. Some will never move to the cloud. Cloud computing is about a style for every service. The only bad cloud strategy is no cloud strategy.”