It’s that time again when we are looking into our crystal ball. Denis Martin, Executive VP and CTO at NaviSite made the following predictions in VMBlog’s 2012 Virtualization and Cloud Prediction Series.

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In 2011, the hype around cloud computing subsided and real adoption began to accelerate in the second half of the year. Enterprises are more comfortable with the current levels of compliance, security, and reliability and are deploying real applications, such as financial applications, messaging applications and custom applications, in cloud production environments. We expect cloud adoption to accelerate throughout 2012 as IT organizations continue their transformation and as they begin to realize financial and productivity benefits over performing all IT functions in-house. In 2012 not only will security be an enabling technology in cloud adoption, but large enterprises will rely on cloud-based security technology to help ensure corporate security and compliance in place of internal security technologies.

The cloud will continue to evolve and become more “Enterprise-Ready.” By this I mean that cloud infrastructure will evolve from infrastructure, price, and self service to be an enabling technology/platform that will create more urgency within the IT organization to migrate applications to a cloud infrastructure.

Here is what to look for in 2012:

Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services – The cloud will not change disaster recovery fundamentals of having a solid disaster recovery plan that have been through regular “disaster drills” but the cloud will greatly extend disaster recovery options that yield significant cost savings and flexibility for businesses. Cloud-based Recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) will include the ability to completely replicate virtual environments in multiple data centers worldwide.

Security – Organizations will become accustomed to relying on service providers to deliver enterprise class security at the same level or a higher level than currently maintained in-house.  Additionally, companies will move toward cloud-based security in order to enable the cloud environment growth through compliance at the same rate as the business growth

IT Will Select Service Providers with Application Expertise – IT organizations will look towards cloud providers for their application expertise and their ability and flexibility to optimize their cloud infrastructure for business-critical applications. Application optimization needs to be addressed across the entire technology stack, from the physical hardware to the service delivery architecture to the application. By selecting cloud infrastructure that is already optimized for a specific application, the assessment, optimization, testing and validation stages required to migrate to cloud computing is much more efficient. Service providers with an in-depth knowledge of enterprise applications, like messaging, will solidify their position as a trustworthy partner to IT.

Infrastructure as a Service and On-Demand Application Capacity Become a Reality – While businesses are now able to quickly create new VMs to add capacity, even clone existing virtual machines to reduce the time to production, there will be advancements in true dynamic scaling.  These advancements will be the result of increased monitoring and management instrumentation from IaaS providers as well as through the Application Programming Interfaces (API’s.)  With these new capabilities IaaS offerings will become more responsive to workload needs and applications will have the opportunity to programmatically interact with the infrastructure. These capabilities will support the next level of dynamic scaling for cloud based workloads.

Visibility and Control Becomes Simplified - One of the basic premises of cloud computing is the ability to self-service. But as more and more applications move into large fluid virtual environments, the need for transparency, visibility and control becomes paramount. In 2012 we will see more instrumentation that simplifies the management of these complex environments.

And finally, 2012 will be the year we see IT move to the cloud as the core delivery for key in-house applications rather than infrastructure augmentation.