What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2011?  Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

2010 was the year of cloud understanding and "testing the waters". Within the enterprise and 2011 will be the year of cloud adoption. The hype around cloud computing will calm down and  real adoption will accelerate in 2011, as analyst firms like Gartner and IDC have predicted that in the next five years the majority of enterprise workloads will be running on cloud enabled infrastructure.

In 2010 a lot of enterprises explored infrastructure virtualization and automation technologies primarily to maximize their existing IT infrastructure investments. In 2011 as they start realizing that the cloud provides benefits not only in cost reduction through better utilization of resources but also in business agility and performance, the adoption phenomenon will peak.

2010 was the year of private cloud, and 2011 will be the year of public/hybrid cloud - as enterprises have begun understanding that they can reap more benefits using a combination of public and private clouds, creating a very cost effective and highly optimized IT environment. Enterprise will start putting their non-critical and burstable workloads in the public cloud environments. Cloud service providers who can help enterprises build these hybrid environments will benefit the most during 2011.

As enterprises start building these IT environments spanning across multiple private/public/hosted clouds, there will be a strong need for an end to end visibility into the performance and health of workloads, applications and processes running in those environments. New tools will be required for system and service management at a higher level. Enterprises will favor the cloud service providers who can offer and easily integrate with these management tools, providing them with full visibility and control.

One of the key inhibitors for cloud adoption has been the concern around security and compliance. In 2011, the cloud security concern will subside. As more enterprises start using cloud services, they will realize that with proper controls and governance in place cloud infrastructure and services are more secure than the existing enterprise data centers.

Finally, bare metal Infrastructure-as-a- Service will become a commodity, and the true value will come from services provided up the IT stack like applications management, development platforms or integration platform as services.

About the Author

Vishal Sharma is Senior Director of Cloud Computing at NaviSite. He leads strategy, marketing and business development functions for all Cloud Services within NaviSite. Sharma has over fifteen years of experience in the technology industry in Marketing, Strategy, Planning and Business Development and has worked for EMC, Microsoft, Gartner, CGI and TCS in the past. He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and an MBA from Wharton Business School.