Forrester predicts the cloud's future for 2011

James Staten of Forrester Research recently made a number of predictions for cloud computing in 2011, focusing on realistic expectations companies can have when dealing with the cloud in the next year. Overall, Staten expects IaaS and PaaS cloud systems to increase their role in the enterprise, but most of his predictions have more to do with cloud computing's affect on overall business operations.

Staten's first prediction deals with the role of the CIO, who will be further empowered in business environments. The advent of cloud computing is changing business models, making CIOs leaders in strategic enterprise planning, expanding their role from the traditional place as a behind-the-scenes business facilitator. As cloud computing is deployed in the enterprise, IT departments will be able to focus on enterprise-enhancing activities. Creating new software, improving customer support and designing new products are all ways that the cloud can help IT expand revenue over the next year, according to the report.

Staten also expects private clouds to fail. However, this failure is simply a part of the process of learning how to deploy the cloud successfully. Staten said companies planning to implement a private cloud in the near future, or have already done so, can expect the establishment to fail over the course of the year. However, this shortcoming is the result of putting a new technology into the enterprise and dealing with the growing pains. Overall, private clouds can be incredibly successful investments. Companies need to start small and deal with manageable private clouds, otherwise they could get in too deep, and set themselves up for initial failure as they experiment with the new technology. Staten goes as far as to recommend designing a private cloud with the full knowledge that it will fail.

"Your strategy should be to fail fast and fail quietly," Staten said.

Hosting is also likely to become a major area for growth in the next year. Staten expects hosted private clouds to outnumber internal ones by a three to one ration within the year. Essentially, private clouds can be too demanding for internal deployment. Virtualizing servers, managing control panels and hypervisors, maintaining service, speed and performance, powering the data center and keeping it all afloat can create major challenges for IT departments. Staten believes most businesses will not be ready to handle this task in 2011. However, he said cloud hosting service providers will be, meaning companies will likely turn to server hosting companies to house their private cloud environments.

In an interesting, government-led turn, Staten predicts community clouds to grow in the next year. The Government Services Agency is working on a community cloud, as is the European Union. These governmental groups are leading the way to community cloud computing growth, as businesses use the community cloud to overcome compliance issues. The inherent logic, according to Staten, makes sense. Companies all struggle independently to tackle cloud compliance issues, but if they work in community, more can be accomplished, Staten said.

Using information and data to generate revenue is another trend Staten anticipates in 2011. Companies, such as the Associated Press, use stores of data and information distributed through the cloud to generate significant incomes. As the technology matures in 2011 and more businesses realize they have information that could create revenue, this model of cloud-based information utilities could become a growing commodity in the enterprise market, according to Staten.

Overall, Staten expects 2011 to be a year of maturation for the cloud. The hype surrounding the technology is growing into genuine application, and companies will begin to go through the growing pains of deploying the cloud and learning some of its intricacies in the next year.