It’s no secret that cloud computing continued to be the buzz phrase of 2011, and 2012 is no exception.

While cloud strategies have been deployed by IT departments for several years, they are still in the early adoptive stages for enterprises, which are beginning to realize the cost savings and productivity gains that result from software-as-a-service and other cloud-based services.

As cloud gains traction in various markets, there has been an unfolding of trends that IT professionals and cloud service providers need to pay attention to. After checking out a new report from Information Week, we’ve handpicked a few cloud computing trends worth sharing.

Drivers of Cloud: Disaster Recovery and Scalability

The first trend to consider is what exactly is driving cloud computing. As Information Week points out, on-demand computing changes the economics of disaster recovery significantly.

“In 2012, disaster recovery and elastic scaling will replace cost savings and convenience as the big reasons for enterprises to adopt the cloud,” the report said.

Service Level Agreements

One of the obstacles enterprises perceive to stand in the way of shifting to the cloud is less-than-satisfactory SLAs, according to Information Week. However, since cloud is never a one-size-fits-all strategy, your service level agreements shouldn’t be either.

“Clouds offer availability zones, CDN front-ends, shared storage, message queues, and dozens of other building blocks with which an architect can create applications of unprecedented scale and resiliency,” the report said. “And that’s the second problem with the complaints about cloud SLAs: The best SLA is the one you architect for yourself.”

But the vendors are moving down the right path, and the service providers whose business depends upon security and delivering against SLAs are all embracing and actively pursuing relevant certifications, according to Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division at Citrix and current CTO and co-founder of Bromium, a cloud security company.

The Rise of Cloud Brokerages

Just like accountants need to manage bills payable and bills receivable, IT professionals are beginning to be fraught with juggling multiple cloud providers – in some cases – not to mention negotiating contracts. Herein lies the opportunity for cloud brokerages to get their piece of the pie. As enterprise IT teams look to shift their technologies to the cloud in 2012, cloud brokerages will become more relevant.

“We’re already seeing the start of cloud brokerages,” according to the Information Week report. “Spot markets are an early indicator of the market liquidity necessary for a brokerage.”

The report notes that “cross-cloud” platform-as-a-service offerings like OpenShift and Cloud Foundry help workloads to move from cloud to cloud; brokers like Cloudability aim to streamline billing and management of multiple contracts, for example.

Putting More Data In the Cloud

While data security remains a real concern among C-level execs, we are learning (and accepting more) how moving data to the cloud is actually safer on many levels for organizations – especially for small and medium-sized businesses, which are likely employing inefficient filing methods for critical data.

Information Week points to the medical field as a prime example of a beneficiary of cloud-based services.

“We criticize the cloud, but we don’t compare apples to apples. We don’t really understand the costs of paper medical records, evidence stored on analog tape, student information saved in a single spreadsheet. In 2012, we’ll start to do a real comparison of on- and off-cloud solutions, and realize that, for many businesses, the real question is what can’t be better done in a cloud.”

Code, Data and Infrastructure

These three elements, which often function disparately, will become intertwined as cloud computing evolves.

“Tomorrow’s applications will include three kinds of code: instructions for the business process itself; instructions for how to handle the data needed; and instructions for how to manage growth, shrinkage, and failure,” according to the report.

So for example, “a customer service application that can run on both public and private clouds. This application accesses a database that contains both innocuous information (the name of a customer, or his purchase history) as well as heavily regulated information (his social security number).”

For more cloud computing trends, check back later this week for part two.