It is that time of the year again: first we dim the lights, close the shades, light candles and put soft music in the background – then we take time to look at our crystal ball, to bring you the latest on what lies in the future (the future of your database in the cloud that is).

So, without further ado, here are our predictions for 2012:

1. The Cloud will disappear – not in the sense that it will be gone (far from it) but rather in that that it will become all-encompassing and omnipresent. We will no longer see The Cloud as a trend or even an alternate model for using compute resources – it will become transparent as it will be the de facto default means of choice for nearly all IT-backed projects across industry sectors.
2. Cloud Plurality – instead of focusing on a single cloud, we will be using multiple clouds simultaneously. Many different reasons – including cost, performance, availability, coverage and locality – will make being cloud-independent and cross-cloud-able a must requirement rather than just a nice-to-have benefit.
3. PaaS is King – with cloud resources’ commoditization on the one hand and developers’ general indifference to infrastructure on the other, PaaS providers will be in position to offer the best value to cloud consumers. This means that we’ll see fierce competition in the market as IaaS players will continue to expand their offering with integrated platform services and as PaaS vendors will diversify their platform stacks and services.
4. Enterprise Clouds – next year will be the tipping point for enterprises and mission critical applications to move to the clouds – with the technology, players and practices established. Enterprise datacenters will be migrated to private clouds and enterprise applications will be deployed there as well as on virtually-private, public and hybrid clouds. As a result we’ll see PaaS & SaaS offerings making their way as products (licensed or downloadable software) for the enterprises’ consumption in their own clouds.
5. Cloud Databases Are Here to Stay – the proliferation and maturity of cloud computing will continue to strengthen and drive the need for reliable database services in that ecosystem. The use of multiple cloud infrastructures coupled with the automation goodness that PaaS endows will make service-like cloud databases the natural choice that will be preferred over DIY as well as managed ones.

In retrospect, we were pretty much right on the money with our last year’s predictions – so as the momentum keeps, looks like 2012 is going to be an extremely exciting year!

Source: http://xeround.com/blog/2011/12/2012-predictions