It's that time of year that everyone issues their predictions for the year ahead, and there certainly have been some good forecasts about impending or continuing developments in the cloud market. Louis Columbus, a fellow contributor here at Forbes, recently channeled a compelling list of cloud predictions from research firm IDC, and Suhas Sreedhar adds additional insights for the year ahead.
In the spirit of prediction-making, I am offering my own. But rather than provide another list, I have just one prediction for the year ahead.
That is, cloud computing is set to become mainstream computing, period.
We'll continue to call it "cloud" for some time to come, and vendors will continue to pitch it as "cloud," but it's now the mainstream. We've seen this before. In the early 1990s, there was client/server computing, in which PCs were provided access to larger back-end systems. Then, it was Internet computing, in which applications and data were exposed through websites. We still have mobile computing, but the act of using smartphones to access back-end applications and data is simply being thought of as computing as well.
This is more than a matter of semantics. Consider what's been happening, and will be status quo in the year ahead. All startups and established independent software vendors are delivering software over the cloud. Many don't even bother to ship CDs or download updates to customers' machines. Plus, on-premises systems are increasingly being supplemented of extended with online components. Many enterprises are considering making their next upgrade to the cloud version. 2014 is also the year when a majority of data center traffic will be cloud-borne, as projected by Cisco.
It makes no difference whether a server is a box in the local data center, or someone else's box in Virginia or California. It makes no difference if a purchasing process is built on public APIs or on-site ERP. Data may be stored locally by law, but other data may be stored elsewhere.
So, over the coming year, the biggest news for cloud computing is that it will not be news. It's the way we do computing today.
