Cloud Computing Trends in 2011

This year, 2011, brings a lot of new innovation in the tech arena, not to mention a plethora of new and most likely annoying buzz words…my guess is that most will center on some form of geo location technology (Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook places are becoming more and more mainstream) “Hey, look at me I’m geo loco!”. Or something like “Mac Apps” to depict Apple’s foray into applications beyond mobile for their non iOS computing platforms — and of course the obligatory social technology based buzzwords.

Cloud computing has become a buzzword for a couple of years now and rightfully so, but has the cloud computing trend really caught on full force? No, but in 2011 we’ll see adoption rates soar on the three levels, enterprise, SMBs (this is big) and the consumer themselves. Gartner Inc. places cloud computing among its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011. “Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor’s public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e. best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer’s enterprise.”

I caught a fairly humorous and cynical post at the Forbes site this morning I thought was worth sharing. It was written by Gene Marks, a small business owner. If for nothing else, the title provides a chuckle – We Will Never Accept Jake Gyllenhaal As A Warrior Prince. But Small Business Owners Are Starting to Accept the Cloud. He takes on many of the issues I addressed in posts throughout 2010; security, scalability and acceptance.

“Back in the day, there was some mystery about them (cloud based apps). Now I’ve got World War II veterans grilling me about multi-tenancy and scalability.”

Take a lighthearted but worthwhile look at the article. Gene couldn’t be more right about 2011 and the cloud.

Happy New Year!