Cloud Communications

The Deepening Union Between Cloud Communications and Mobile

By Erin Harrison Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services and embrace enterprise mobility initiatives, mobile and cloud are converging. With more mobile workers and consumers supporting tablets, mobile content, mobile video and personal cloud services, the IT world is in another state of transition, as the “anytime” availability and unlimited storage is critical for businesses.

In fact, almost 70 percent of the workforce in North America relies on mobile devices, according to a recent blog post by Richa Pokhriyal, digital strategist at India-based Egocentrix.

“With the cloud computing technologies delivery of mobile apps and access of data with mobile platforms is much more feasible and easy,” Pokhriyal said. “The motive to use mobile devices in business is to achieve work flexibility and anytime data access.”

Cloud is a key benefit of this trend, as it allows for data to be hosted in the cloud, and therefore available anytime, from anywhere. As an example, cloud computing allows employees to access their business e-mail anywhere with SaaS (News - Alert) services such as Exchange 2010 hosting, as well as enables efficient collaboration and sharing with services like SharePoint 2010 hosting.

“Apart from SaaS services, cloud servers’ virtual private server provides flexible yet secure option for storage as compared to traditional servers,” Pokhriyal adds. “These cloud services provides cost effectiveness and with some configuration could be easily accessed with various types of mobile devices.”

She points to the consumer electronics industry, which shows market trends that the demand for desktops is decreasing and – on the other hand – sale of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is skyrocketing.

The number of PCs is increasing at the rate of 10 percent every year, and the number of new mobile devices is crossing the rate of 100 percent, according to Pokhriyal.

“Businesses have realized that the traditional method of working is no more beneficial. So association of cloud and mobile seems a promising one,” she notes. “This relationship has grown strong in past few years with more companies adopting hosted solutions over cloud.”

This increasing relationship between cloud and mobile will continue to heighten, as mobile device “battles” are among the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013, according to Gartner (News - Alert).

Gartner further predicts that by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide, and that by 2015, more than 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones, TMCnet reported.

By 2015, media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s (News - Alert) Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Enterprises will therefore need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware, Gartner concluded.

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