Outlook for cloud in 2012

Private clouds will predominantly appear in the form of internal clouds that replicate the offerings of infrastructure-as-a-service vendors. Many large organisations will engage in data centre transformation projects or build new data centres in order to offer business units access to IT resources. Chargeback mechanisms will be built in, resources will be accessed via browsers and apps and the benefits associated with scalability and rapid provisioning will be integrated. These internal clouds will have most of the characteristics of public clouds.

In summary, cloud computing will have a profound impact on the way businesses operate. The cloud model will engender research as so then as give businesses an possibility to enhance existing business processes, in doing so making themselves more competitive.

Green data centers are environmentally friendly, and they can as well save both capex and opex by using appropriate innovation. Extreme Networks' White Paper on Green shows how this can be achieved.