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Organizations have almost every technology available “as-a-service,” from platforms to infrastructure and beyond. And cloud isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. According to IDG Research, enterprises will spend an average of $1.5M on cloud services by the end of 2014. So what trends should you look for in 2013 and the years beyond? Here are 5 trends that expected to play out in the coming years.
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Creating Strategic Models for Cloud Service Consumption

A recent Gartner survey revealed that an internal cloud services brokerage is emerging, whose job it is to improve the provisioning of cloud services for employees and external business partners. As organizations add more and more cloud providers to the mix, this role will become vital.
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Software Defined Networking

The increased adoption of cloud server providers will bring SDN to the forefront. SDN brings agility to networks in the same way that virtualization brings agility to servers. To ensure a successful cloud strategy, Gartner recommends organizations consider “open, standard northbound controller APIs to maximize flexibility and minimize lock-in,” and make sure that internal teams coordinate to maximize the advantages of a software-controlled data center.
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Creating “Webscale” Systems

More idealistically, cloud computing aims to create “Webscale” systems: extremely large systems that have this ability to expand and contract as needed. Carl Claunch, VP analyst at Gartner, commented that this scale could reach up to “hundreds of thousands of transactions per section, rates that we aren’t conceiving of with traditional, internal IT,” during Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013 Webinar. Just as quickly, these systems should be able to shrink or completely disappear once a project is completed.
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Addressing “Shadow Cloud”

The personal cloud is replacing the PC as the “location” where people keep their personal content, according to Claunch. Now employees have come to expect that level of access to corporate documents. And this trend will only continue to grow until enterprises can no longer ignore it. IT will need to address the assess how to enable secure, sanctioned employee access information or face the challenge and risk unsecure workarounds (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, personal email, etc.)
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Spending in Cloud Services will Continue to Rise

It almost goes without saying that investment in cloud computing will continue to grow, with spending up 10 percent over 2012. According to the 2013 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, in 2013 large companies (defined as those with more than 1,000 employees) will spend $2.8M, with SMBs investing an average of $486K. Investment in SaaS and IaaS will be particularly strong, growing from 8 percent in 2012 to 13 percent in 2013 and 7 percent in 2012 to 10 percent 2013, respectively.