Anyone who has been following the cloud developments in the industry can easily make the following predictions…

1. Companies such as SkyPe and Google Voice will continueto cut into the market share of big telecommunication giants such as Verizon, AT&T, Time-Warner – and the latter will probably never recover.
2. The biggest cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, HP, IBM, etc. will continue to operate securely and will detract hackers from penetrating their Data Centers and SaaS Platforms.
3. More customers this year will likely feel that their cloud based infrastructure services have matured to a level where production application deployment is possible alongside their test and development or non-mission critical applications.
4. At the end of 2012, businesses would have greater virtualization knowledge; they would have come to the end of their first cloud contract, and so, with a whole host of cloud providers in the market, they will jump from provider to provider searching for a better deal.
5. Microsoft, Google, IBM, telecoms and others will give competition to Amazon’s AWS(EC2 and S3) will not be the overall leader any longer.
6. 2013 should be the “Year of the Cloud” for most SMBs. A recent survey found that more than half the SMBs are already using Cloud services and the number is expected to zoom in 2013.
7. A recent study highlighted that a cloud-ready network is the biggest infrastructure element required for further cloud deployments. 2013 will be a year where the focus shifts more to production application deployments. This will require customers and cloud providers to consider a solution that wraps in secure, performance-backed network connectivity from their premise to the cloud.
8. During 2012, the cloud was considered less safe than locally managed software. As these companies ease into greater trust in the cloud, and with security threats always looming, even more businesses will link their virtual services to a secure, private network to ensure greater protection. Limiting access and implementing stricter security measures is also critical for ensuring regulatory compliance, which became a growing concern for cloud-reliant businesses in 2012. As there is greater demand for aligned virtual services, as well as migration services, this year to ensure safe, uninterrupted transitions to the cloud, and there’s no reason to think this will decrease across the industry in 2013.