Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Ready for a bit of good news? According to officials of appliance deployment provider NEI (News - Alert), 2012, will actually be the year when “enterprise IT departments begin to adopt and use cloud technologies aligned with their needs.”

Wouldn’t that be cool? Sure would. Many companies over the past few years have been a bit slow on transitioning to the cloud, held back mainly by security concerns, but that’s all changing now.

Over the past couple years, according to a recent TMCnet report, the migration to cloud computing services is up “significantly.”

In fact, in a survey conducted at Interop (News - Alert) Las Vegas 2011, which polled 94 network engineers, IT managers and executives, “61 percent of respondents reported that they have deployed cloud computing services on their network in 2011.” And adoption rates aren’t slowing down.

This year, according to tech research firm Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), corporations and IT Cloud platform providers will align with each other.

Recently, NEI reported Frost & Sullivan officials’ forecast in an informative blog post that highlighted three key trends they see in cloud for 2012.

“The new buzzwords in cloud networking will be ‘Platform as a Service’ as providers begin to launch platform-rich cloud services.” What this means is that companies can be assured that cloud providers will invest in the training and education necessary, so they’ll be a lot less reluctant to adopt cloud themselves. Think of Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert), top cloud service providers, expanding their network offerings with what NEI officials see as “function-rich” network management products and integrated design-and-deliver services.

“‘Infrastructure as a Service’ will accompany ‘Platform as a Service’ with enhanced performance and security offerings reinforced by service agreements.” In other words, we’re going to see a lot more value-add services coming down the pike, Frost & Sullivan officials say. Remember managed hosting services? F&S say cloud platform providers will tweak their wares to resemble those, to “get companies to feel more comfortable using cloud-based networks by providing higher levels of accountability and support for these services.”

Last year, a TMCnet contributor noted that when it comes to IaaS, “organizations are now able to deliver and control virtual IT resources such as storage, computing and networking capacity through IaaS models, in which the product is offered through the Internet to the client as an on-demand service,” and the IaaS providers themselves “own, run, maintain and distribute IT resources more efficiently and cost-effectively than historic IT delivery models.” So you can understand the appeal.

“Cloud networking, Ethernet capability, and data center services will combine to create the ultimate solution for businesses seeking single-source capability.” This is good news for several reasons, not the least of which is that communications service providers will have lots of opportunities to get a foothold in the marketplace, along with the data center operators.