The Cloud is Top IT Trend
At a recent Gartner symposium in Orlando, FL, one of its analysts said that the cloud has topped the company’s list of the 10 top tech that IT people need to plan for.
While acknowledging that cloud computing is complicated and presents security challenges for some, Garnter analyst Dave Cearley advised companies to figure out:
- what cloud services might give them value,
- how to write applications that run on cloud services,
- whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company’s firewall.
The advice on cloud computing came as part of a talk on top 2010 trends that companies should incorporate into their strategic planning, if not their own computers.
Other trends on the list:
2. advanced analytics
3. client computing
4. IT for green
5. reshaping the data center
6. social computing
7. security–activity monitoring
8. flash memory
9. virtualization for availability
10. mobile applications.
Another analyst highlighted virtualization as a top trend, not just broadly, in the sense that virtualization lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, but also as a means to keep computing services up and running despite computer failures.
At the symposium, Carl Claunch said that virtual machines can be moved from one physical machine to another today. But later, by keeping two machines synchronized, a failure in a first machine can be eased over rapidly by moving the active service to the backup.
“We should start seeing this roll out in the next year or two from vendors,” he said.
Read more of the story on cloud computing and virtualization.