Communications and Technology Industry Research

Like any new technology, cloud computing has a number of technical and operational challenges to overcome. According to a recent article from PR Newswire (News - Alert), large enterprises are nonetheless investing heavily in cloud technology due to its many advantages, namely scalability and cost efficiency. The wide acceptance of cloud computing, as with the uptake of any new service, creates plenty of opportunities for test equipment vendors to develop solutions to its problems.

In fact, customer-dependent market research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) released data yesterday which demonstrates just how large the cloud services market currently is. Cloud infrastructure Testing, Frost & Sullivan's analysis found, earned revenues of $68 million in 2010, while Cloud-based Application Monitoring Markets earned $168 million in revenues in the same period.

The analysis also suggests each market will reach yearly revenues of $320.2 million and $556.2 million respectively by 2017.

Availability and security were revealed to be the two most important factors for deploying cloud services. Obviously, despite data or applications being stored in the cloud, those using cloud systems need to be able to access their data quickly and at any given moment. Security – always a concern when dealing with data – is of extreme importance with cloud systems and the market has met this demand with data protection, application security, privacy and standard compliance products and services.

"Besides testing the cloud infrastructure for security, scalability and performance, enterprises also seek insights into the performance of applications hosted in the cloud environment,” said Srihari Padmanabhan, a Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst. “Service providers, enterprise organizations and network engineers need to understand the root cause of faults in the network by gaining end-to-end visibility across the cloud, giving numerous opportunities for application monitoring as well."

Cloud-based application monitoring was also found to be an important aspect of the cloud services market as users and businesses want to be able to monitor the performance of cloud applications. In this area, open-source solutions have popped up to fill this need. Despite the fact that these solutions do not provide insights into the actual performance of applications, they have been generally accepted as an alternative to traditional application performance monitoring solutions.

More information on Frost & Sullivan's research can be found at the Frost & Sullivan Web site, while more detailed feedback can be had by emailing Jeannette Garcia, Corporate Communications, at jeannette.garcia@frost.com. Those inquiring must include their full name, company name, job title, telephone number, company email address, company Web site, city, state and country.