In 2011, Cloud Computing was definitely in the Early Adopter phase.  At the start of 2012, we look forward to the Early Majority phase of Cloud adoption.  So, what’s the state of Cloud Computing out in the trenches of the SMB market?  Here’s where I think we are.

1. A little cloud for everyone.  Some key services have been moved into the cloud for most companies.  This includes Spam Scrubbing, Hosted Exchange, Online Backup, and Web Content Filtering.
2. Key applications in the cloud.  More and more applications are being written for use over the web, such as Salesforce, Google Apps, and Office 365.  We’re also seeing traditional applications like Quickbooks and Microsoft Office being distributed over the Internet using products like XenApps (Quickbooks appears to be running locally, but it’s really running in a data center somewhere).
3. Mobile Computing.  Everyone wants to be able to do everything from whatever technology they happen to have handy – smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, and desktops.  Cloud computing supports mobile computing better than the more traditional approach to computing.
4. Virtual Desktops.  VDI is now becoming more common, but usually deployed on-premise rather than as a hosted cloud product.  VDI’s popularity is due to ease of deployment and support of your virtualized desktop infrastructure.  Not to mention that VDI is an excellent platform for companies trying to provide seamless access for notebooks, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones.
5. Webtop rather than VDI.  You must check out OS33’s Webtop – rather than making a full desktop available in the cloud, a Webtop is a web application that presents applications and such to the user via a browser.  Apps are delivered using XenApps or something similar.  This provides better performance, and eliminates the confusion users often have with the “Desktop within a desktop” approach of VDI.  Webtops are going to be HUGE.   This also works exceptionally well with tablets and smartphones.
6. Redundant Internet Connections.  Everyone is realizing how dependent we are on our Internet connections, once we start leveraging Cloud Computing.
7. Use any storage anywhere.  We are seeing many options for storage, so platform vendors are allowing us to use whatever storage we can find – local on our network, in our own data center, at Amazon S3, at Google, wherever.  And we can make access to this storage seamless to our clients via platform.

There are some things that we’ll need in order to take Cloud Computing to the next level.

1. Directory Integration.  Microsoft released SBS Essentials, which has a feature to link the onsite Active Directory to your Hosted Exchange’s Active Directory, simplifying user administration.  This is a good start, but we will need a LOT more of this as Cloud becomes ubiquitous.  If a typical company is running 10 major applications and systems, that’s 10 times the amount of user administration as a traditional network environment, across multiple systems and platforms.  In the corporate world, there is a technology that’s been around for about 10 years, called Identity Management, that’s been doing this integration between dissimilar systems.  We need to move this technology to the Cloud.  Today, there are some attempts to address with with password management, but that helps the end user, without addressing the bigger issue of redundant user data maintenance.
2. Better Licensing.  Microsoft has to wake up about their VDA licensing, and the way they license Microsoft Office for the Cloud.  VDA is “Virtual Desktop Access” license, and is $100 per computer per year, unless that PC’s desktop OS is covered by their Software Assurance program.  Also, Microsoft Office Standard can be put on a PC as an OEM license for about $180.  It costs about $350 to put that same version of Office on a Virtual PC, because you must use the Open Business or Open Value licensing on virtual PCs.  If Microsoft doesn’t address this, it will be an opening for someone else to grab up market share.  Google Apps and Oracle’s Open Office come to mind.

That’s all I have for now.  I can’t wait to see what 2012 brings to Cloud Computing!