By Ben Trowbridge, Alsbridge, Inc.

Cloud sourcing is a dynamic aspect of the IT industry that is revolutionizing the IT services market. Alsbridge's expert cloud sourcing advisors predict 2012 will be a year of both opportunity and destruction for providers and enterprises in the cloud.

Top 12 Cloud Predictions for 2012:

1. There are massive opportunities to bring cloud features into the enterprise and there have been increasingly more providers with tooling to help make that a reality. But, it is also going to be a year where consolidation across enterprise cloud vendors will increasingly occur. If the vendor competes in a crowded solution space, short term survival means being acquired, or going public. Only a sliver of vendors are positioned to survive as stand-alone providers.
2. Cloud projects for top-line revenue growth; +50% by 2014 (SaaS and BPaaS particularly) sponsored by business line or functional managers will accelerate over the next 18 months as business perceives IT to be too busy to meet demands for expansions and experimentation.
3. Security concerns will continue into 2012 and will be the main impediment to adopting public and hybrid cloud solutions by enterprises. There will be a re-examination of the differentiation between business requirements and business policies to refine information security requirements.
4. Cloud support for social networking mobile app access and enterprise collaboration will continue to accelerate (like business driven top line revenue project), over the next 2 years. Grassroots knowledge [content] sharing adoption will ramp up with double to triple digit pace year-over-year and thus on-demand options will be the flavored delivery method. Legacy corporate intranets will be molded into this new information ecosystem.

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