Today, we witness the evolution of several companies through cloud platform. While starting a new firm you need an IT infrastructure like email, file storage, accounting, CRM, and telephony, to kick start the business. But now all of this can be subscribed as a service in the cloud. SMB's are going to continue to lead the cloud adoption push. An emerging trend Datapriseis seeing over the last twelve months is that customers are no longer asking why they need to move to cloud instead they are asking why we are not yet in the cloud. It's a big shift from a time not too long ago where we had to educate our customers and try to convince them to make the move from an on-premise environment.

Enterprise business is where we have just scratched the surface, and it's one of the most exciting spaces where we see lots of innovation. Day-by-day it's becoming easier and more feasible to transition large inter-dependent applications to the cloud. An emerging trend is the hybrid approach that has evolved and that sits well with the CIOs. There, they are comfortable to migrate applications that they don't want the control on to public cloud while leaving the rest of the applications on a private cloud infrastructure. Initially cloud technologies were adopted for operational savings, but businesses are realizing that they can accelerate innovation and empower their companies using cloud solutions. At Dataprise, we partner with firms ranging from SMB to Enterprise with our Cloud Management, Building and Advisory services.

However, cloud technology is surrounded with some enduring challenges that portray a diminished image on it. Inter-cloud communication is one of the biggest challenges for most enterprise businesses today. You might have an application that the vendor might have SaaS solution for, but this application needs to talk to another app hosted in your private cloud. But today, you are not able to create reliable and secure connection for both of them to talk to one another. Another example where you have multiple cloud solutions through different providers but are not able to move assets between them seamlessly.

Another of the big challenges facing the cloud are in regards to bandwidth, ease of deployment and management, and legacy applications that are not cloud ready. Internet bandwidth can become the biggest bottleneck for any cloud solution. But bandwidth is getting faster and cheaper, we are seeing the telecom providers laying down fiber cables. Now, many cities in the U.S. offer uptoone gigabyte connection at an affordable price. When devising a cloud strategy, one needs to map out the connection speed required for each app. For example, a web based application can be easily functional when hosted in cloud; while accessing CAD drawings might not be ideal choice to run on cloud, if you don't have the sufficient bandwidth. It is good to discuss this with a trusted cloud partner who understands potential bandwidth limitations.

Deploying and managing a cloud solution can be tricky. While cloud providers have gotten better, I think there is still a huge learning curve to transition and then manage a cloud service on your own. We recommend you either use a service provider like Dataprise to work with you to come up with a scalable cloud strategy, and then help you deploy and manage your applications in the cloud.