What is in store for the cloud in 2014?

In the last 12 months, cloud has remained a buzzword for many mainstream organisations. Many now have cloud embedded into their systems, and there has also been an increase in the use of public cloud services by both organisations and consumers.

This increase in cloud usage, has resulted in boundaries starting to blur, especially in the areas of managed infrastructure, with customers not just asking “can I buy a cloud infrastructure service?”, or “can I buy a traditional managed service?”, but wanting to know how they are going to put them together, how they are going to make them work and how they can get the best value of the different features.

So what does this mean for cloud in 2014? One of the major trends that will occur will be a shift in perception, with organisations looking to cloud to provide them with the ability to access integrated solutions on demand and not just looking at cloud to provide standalone services. This will create a focus for cloud services in three areas; cloud aggregation, cloud integration and cloud management.

· Cloud aggregation refers to how the CIO brings in cloud services into the business, whether that is from different vendors or directly within their own organisation. It also looks at how CIOs can then make these services readily available to the business to bring in agility and innovation. CIOs need to be able to supply cloud services to their organisation with the same flexibility and agility that can be achieved by the business purchasing these directly.

· Integration is how the CIO will take these services and put them together, to build broader services and solutions. Solutions that deliver increased value by combining multiple cloud services with on-premise systems. This will especially see changes in the area of application development where instead of new applications being developed to provide business support there is a focus on integrating to create new solutions and ensuring things are fit for purpose.

· Therewill be an urgency to improve how organisations manage cloud services. Whilst organizations only consumed a handful of services their management could be accommodated by IT Operations in an ad-hoc way. The need for innovation and flexibility will drive CIOs to look for a broader range of cloud services so they will end up consuming 30, 40 or 50 within their organisation. This maturity in cloud consumption needs to be met with a similar maturity in cloud management by being able to provision them, monitor them and include them in seamless end-to-end service management.

So where are these trends coming from? Well, many cloud trends are happening all across the world. The US are leading the market and driving where most things are going. Continental Europe is slightly slower, having greater reservations about some of their geographical boundaries and data residency.

The UK sits in-between these markets, which is why the UK is a great place to be in order to learn from what is happening in the US, but also drive that competitive advantage at the head of some of the key European markets.

In summary, for 2014 we can expect organisations to be looking at aggregating their cloud services, integrating them with other services and monitoring and building them across the business. Boundaries will also start to blur between private and public cloud services, making it an exciting year for the cloud.