3. Cloud infrastructure as a commodity, but will the new services help providers retain profits?

Although companies boast of cloud, most of the small scale sectors only use it for a very minimal purpose like for non-mission critical applications. This means that new streams of revenues must be sorted as more and more services are brought into the market under cloud infrastructure.  Complex technologies such as WAN optimization, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and even unified communications (UC) are now being delivered as services.

"The WAN, simply put, has poor characteristics in terms of bandwidth, or latency. This is true as distance increases in order of magnitude between a global workforce and increasingly centralized data," said Ajit Gupta, CEO of WAN optimization as a Service provider Aryaka. "The exchange of mission-critical applications, large files and big data becomes a horrific experience as downloads can take minutes, even hours instead of milliseconds and backup takes days, leaving corporations at risk in the event of a disaster."