By John Levett

The report stressed that a significant proportion of these revenues essentially represent a migration of enterprise spend from traditional siloed offerings. However, it pointed out that cloud-based services can be a highly effective means of ensuring customer retention, through the provision of hosting allied to solutions such as messaging, presence, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony.

Additionally, the Mobile Cloud report observed that the cloud offers communication service providers the opportunity to develop double-sided revenues by opening their APIs (application programming interfaces) to SaaS (Software as a Service) providers and thus share in revenues derived from their services.

Security a key concern

The report cautions that enterprises have two primary concerns regarding migration to the cloud: data security and the extent to which such migration represents a demonstrable ROI (return on investment). For data security, concerns extend both to secure access (that third parties cannot access, amend or steal their data) and to secure storage (that the data hosting company will not lose the stored data).

However, the report highlights the opportunity that these problems in turn offer to cloud security providers. According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, “If an enterprise makes the decision to store data in the cloud, it is imperative that a solution is in place that can dynamically tag and sort that data to determine which data can go to the cloud and which individuals are permitted to have access to that data.”

Other findings from the report include:

• Data outages have the potential to impact severely on cloud-based services unless data redundancy is improved.

• Enterprises need to be aware of the physical location of the servers storing their data.

The Mobile Cloud White Paper is available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the study ‘Mobile Cloud: Smart Device Strategies for Enterprise & Consumer Markets 2011-2016.’

About the author

John Levett is PR at Juniper Research, a company which provides research and analytical services to the global hi-tech communications sector, providing consultancy, analyst reports and industry commentary.