Prediction #1 - By 2016, public cloud infrastructure will include and be mandated to critical national infrastructure regulations by the U.S.:

In lieu of poor economic and debt conditions globally, governments continue to seek ways to reduce their IT operating expenditures, eliminate duplication across their IT organizations and optimize their compute resources.

Several key governments have created initiatives for the adoption of cloud-based services but have yet to experience significant negative impacts due to their cloud services adoption in the form of disruptions or attacks on cloud services providers.

As the economy becomes heavily reliant on public cloud infrastructure for everyday computing activities, cloud services disruptions will pose greater risks to the overall economy and eventually become a threat to national security in the form of economic disruption.

"Public cloud services providers will need to comply with critical infrastructure protection mandates for systems outside of the scope of just federal government use under the FedRAMP program (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program)," said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner.

"Security technology providers will need to prepare their technologies in order to address potential mandates for critical infrastructure protection of public cloud environments. Providers that lack the ability to offer compliant security controls to address critical infrastructure protection mandates will likely face sales difficulties in cloud environments and may be filtered from shortlists based on emerging critical infrastructure protection requirements."

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