Since last decade Cloud Computing has been emerging as a biggest technology in this competitive world. This has drastically changed the need of on-premise IT solutions. The cloud services are continuously becoming the requirement of every sector whether it is SME’s, healthcare, hospitality, automotive, non-profits or education. Cloud computing services are day by day engaging more businesses because of the fact that it offers substantial savings by reducing the IT infrastructure and maintenance cost. Businesses are also facing their heads towards this alluring service as they don’t need to store their data and maintain the servers as earlier. Now no physical storage space is required, they have the access to the cloud, rest all is the responsibility of the cloud service provider to manage, update and maintain the cloud servers on their part. As a result, cloud computing is continuously becoming the choice of all types of enterprises whether it is small or large.

 
As per a recent article on The New York Times it is clearly stated that,” the biggest tech giants including IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are expected to invest $1 billion annually in cloud computing in the upcoming years.”

 
So it is quite obvious that in 2014 we will see many large IT companies emerging with new cloud computing solutions. Hence probably we will be seeing increase in platforms of independent services. Some of the expected trends of cloud computing in 2014 are:

 
1. Virtualization comes as an emerging cloud: In 2014, companies are more inclined towards virtualization and adopting it as a new form of cloud computing. As the industry is shifting continuously to a new cloud platform, earlier from PC to server and now from server to internet. For this the entire infrastructure must be virtualized and centrally manageable. Hence it needs that the servers or the storage devices and the networking equipment should collectively behave like a “giant-machine” or a software-defined machine, where the applications may undertake high scalability.

2. Rise of Hybrid Clouds:

Source:http://blogs.aerohive.com/blog/cloud-networking-3/hybrid-cloud-best-of-both-worlds

Finally it seems that the private and the public clouds are lacking behind by the emerging hybrid cloud. Hybrid Cloud combines the scalability of public cloud and the security of the private cloud. Hence raise the spirit of many companies to adopt a new cloud-based infrastructure with a range of customized solutions.

 
3. Advancement in web-powered apps: With the advancement in the cloud environment with benefits like scalability and security it is essential to develop cloud-based applications that are platform specific. It is the best practice for the businesses to develop JavaScript or HTML5 applications.

4. Expansion in BYOD movement:

Source: http://techpageone.dell.com/category/technology/byod-technology/

Several companies are adopting a new approach named BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), which means the employees have to bring their own devices to access company resources like databases, emails, documents, files and applications. The BYOD movement recently hit the world and will continue to expand in 2014.

 
5. Rise in PaaS (Platform As A Service): With the expansion in cloud infrastructure and improvement in applications, we will see more companies adopting the PaaS in the future. Platform as a service allows the enterprises to lower IT costs however rapidly moving towards application development through testing and deployment.

 
6. Identity Management with More Security Policies: Although the cloud services offer high accessibility, scalability, and security but with the fast growing cloud based applications, businesses should re-consider the security policies. They must deal with identity management solutions to take along a new model of security to the cloud in this upcoming year.

 
7. Big Data As A New Cloud Service: After cloud computing and virtualization, big data is also rising as a new cloud based service. Many organizations are seeing big opportunities in “Big Data” Projects as they will get wide range of benefits from their Big Data efforts. In result of the Big Data, businesses are provided with their respective data which is stored on the cloud by the cloud service provider at a very nominal cost.