We have posted many blogs over the past few years about cloud computing, what it is, how it works, the benefits it offers, concerns over security, etc. Chris Dotson, a cloud expert at IBM recently wrote a blog about the cloud which is an excellent summary if you need to help educate your peers about the cloud.
The cloud computing market is current at 40.7 billion according to Dotson and expected to reach 241 billion by 2020. Many people are using the cloud and don’t even realize it. He gives prime examples such as Gmail, Apple’s iCloud, Flickr, and Dropbox as popular cloud applications. These all fall into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) category. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are other types of cloud computing which he defines in further detail in his post and we have discussed in previous blogs as well.
Cloud computing in all its forms is being adopted across all industries by both large enterprises and small/medium-sized businesses; even those where security is a major concern, such as financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation. Security has been a hurdle for many companies who have not thought that the cloud was secure enough to host their data, applications or systems; however, Dotson states in his blog post that he “is confident that security issues will not deter cloud from becoming commonplace.”
Could cloud computing become such commonplace that in a few years it will be just considered computing? Dotson thinks so.