According to Gartner, leading US technology research and advisory consultancy, the global Software as a Service (SaaS) market is believed to have increased by 15.7 per cent from £5 billion to £5.9 billion during the course of 2010.

In addition, it is predicted that the worldwide SaaS revenue market will see a further growth of 16.2 per cent to £6.8 billion in 2011.

The figures suggest a widespread belief that the business world, from SME to larger enterprises, have reduced their early concerns expressed over network security, response time and outsourcing IT service availability issues as they have begun adopting SaaS with business and cloud computing models, like thin client, DesktopLive.

Moving into the second decade of the 21st century, Cloud computing is gravitating inevitably centre stage of a business data and information exchange environment far removed from late 20th century models. Technology has improved out of all recognition, with better connectivity, higher internet speeds and virtualisation technologies enabling more efficient use of servers.

It appears that there is now a real recognition of the growing need for sophisticated management and security, enabling business organisation to change how they think about IT to take advantage of the necessary agility, efficiency and scalability that cloud computing offers.

No longer viewed with the same levels of scepticism and suspicion at the conceptual margins of proactive IT test-development, cloud approaches, such as SaaS, are increasingly within the mainstream in that they are actively deployed to answer many expanding data-critical software needs.

Various different findings show that around 18 per cent of UK companies are now ‘considering’ cloud computing, between 17 – 32 per cent say they are ‘evaluating’ cloud, and 15 – 39 per cent already using cloud to ‘a certain degree’.

In 2011, cloud computing is a reality an IT manager will require to take on board as their role rapidly transforms to working within an IT support supply chain made up of internal and external services. As more businesses begin to focus on a blend of cloud computing investment with legacy hardware, they will naturally move away from inessential in-house IT ownership, adjusting their approach to purchasing cloud capacity suited to their individual business methods.

Inevitably, most studies reveal that just over a quarter of respondents see cost saving as the biggest motivation from the key business benefits identified of migrating to the cloud, with improved business operational efficiency at around 22 per cent.

Traditionally, deterrents to Cloud adoption have been issues of security, reliability scalability and management and internal resistance and, most often, the perception that public clouds are not suitable for some business applications.

The shift toward approaching IT is helping to align IT decision makers to use “cloud thinking,” and by more fully understanding it’s efficiency, flexibility and scalability, will help to accelerate its adoption.

2011 is already being highlighted as the year of the mobile and a dramatic shift towards mobile internet will also drive forward a move towards cloud computing, both of which will ultimately provide companies with the desired competitive edge.

If there’s one concern that has been regularly rearing it’s head over the years whenever Cloud computing is mentioned, it is the protection of sensitive company data physically stored off-premise. The natural anxieties expressed at a time when MS deskbound computing was the predominant operating system and most business data was stored on software physically installed in the CPU under your desk or locked in the room next to the stationery cupboard just sound a little out of step, these days.

As we head into 2011 and deeper into the age of mobile apps, iPad downloads, Near Field Technology, Google Goggles and augmented reality, it’s fairly evident that the concept of accessing a ‘cloud resource’ of stored remote data, as and when required, onDemand, or as a service on a static or more likely, a mobile platform ‘reader’ or indeed, ‘thin client’, is already here in all but name.

The reality is that the various forms of Cloud computing, which we are all used to using in the form of email, VPN, Flickr and Facebook, for example, actually provides SMEs more protection, IT support and potential network security benefits from the cloud vendor than their own, often limited or non-existent in-house resources and budgets.

On a daily basis, the centralisation of company data provides reduced data leakage as a result of lost, corrupted, crashed, faulty or stolen CPUs, laptops, disks, USBs, back up tapes and remote hard drives. As thin client technology, such as DesktopLive, becomes prevalent, small, temporary caches pose less risk than transporting ‘data buckets’ in the form of laptops and USB datasticks.

Centralisation
In addition, central storage is easier to monitor, control and implement disaster recovery prevention contingencies . For example, a Cloud server can be instantly cloned by ‘forensic’ software if compromised, eliminating or reducing any service downtime. Inevitably, increased competition and business consumer demand will mean that Cloud service vendors will constantly strive to optimise performance by developing ever more efficient security software.

Security Testing
Change control builds, pre-strengthened and ‘secure’, are also primarily a proactive IT benefit of virtualisation based Cloud computing. Reduced exposure within production environments through patching offline means it is easier to test impact of security changes by producing a copy of your production environment, implementing a security change and testing the impact at low cost, with minimal startup time.

Economies of Scale
Deployed within a ‘public cloud’ service and thus, sharing the same application as a service, means only paying a percentage of security testing costs of the Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. Similarly with Platform as a Service (PaaS), there are potential cost economies of scale, as with password strength testing times, which are decreased by restricting activities to dedicated non-production machines, preventing the mixing of sensitive credentials with other workloads.

When proactive IT jargon makes it to the status of the latest buzz words heard freely being circulated at meetings and presentations or appearing on the blogs of related industry sectors, then the implication is that the concept from which these terms have been abstracted is gaining currency by familiarity of use and gently promotes wider acceptance.

Certainly, ‘Software As A Service’ ( SaaS) appears to have been adopted as a handy description that references Cloud computing yet unfortunately, is causing a little confusion, as it is now being erroneously assumed that SaaS is a substitute term for Cloud computing.

With the recent announcement from Google that they are offering their own Cloud as a resource for application provision and media headlines promising superfast broadband is imminent across the UK, the era of Cloud seems to be on the brink. In real terms, of course, we have all been using cloud applications from the moment we sent or received our very first email, and are quite happily downloading mobile apps, watching catch-up TV, etc.

A significant development and a further sign of cloud acceptance – in the US at least – was the November announcement that Cloud computing would be the ‘default approach to IT’ for US government agencies, to take immediate effect. This follows hot on the heels of government reforms already set into motion one year earlier and which are intended to ‘close the IT gap’ between the public and private sectors. Implementing cloud is expected to cut costs, improve security and performance, and speed up deployment of new applications by a 40 per cent reduction in 2,000 plus data centre infrastructure.

As clearly demonstrated by the US policy for radical IT reform, Cloud computing is a term which refers to the ‘enormous scalability’ concept. Thus, Cloud should be understood as a process facilitating use of the internet to access technology-enabled services and applications that run on the web, from location-independent, multiple areas and onDemand rather than on your desktop. This may be readily exemplified by a DesktopLive thin-client set up.

While, it is certainly true that many SaaS applications may be defined by their huge scalability potential, they are still essentially, the software owned, delivered, and managed remotely by one or more Cloud providers. It may be described as basically, enabling the sharing of application processing and data access and storage resources on a pay-per-use or as a subscription service, according to user need.

The fast growth of data analytics allied to complex modelling and simulation now demands powerful and sophisticated, remotely operated computing power required by new generation software.  Inevitably, this means delivering a higher level of IT support, which can no longer be feasibly or economically supported by maintaining on premise hardware. Typically, this might be localised as an IT support Manchester or regionalised as IT support Midlands, etc.

Contrary to abiding anxieties over losing control over sensitive data, security is actually improved due to centralisation, increased security-focused resources and near impossibility of accessing audit logs, far superior to most company own network security systems.