eDiscovery Trends: Forecast for More Clouds
May 23, 2011
No, eDiscoveryDaily has not begun providing weather forecasts on our site. Or stock forecasts.
But, imagine if you could invest in an industry that could nearly sextuple in nine years? (i.e., multiply six-fold).
Well, the cloud computing, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), industry may be just the industry for you. According to a Forrester report from last month, the global cloud computing market will grow from 40.7 billion dollars in 2011 to more than 241 billion dollars by 2020. That’s a 200 billion dollar increase in nine years. That’s enough to put anybody “on cloud nine”!
The report titled Sizing The Cloud by Stefan Ried (Principal Analyst, Forrester) and Holger Kisker (Sr. Analyst, Forrester), outlines the different market dynamics for three core layers of cloud computing, as follows:
- Public Cloud: From 25.5 billion dollars to 159.3 billion dollars by 2020;
- Virtual Private Cloud: From 7.5 billion dollars to 66.4 billion dollars by 2020;
- Private Cloud: From 7.8 billion dollars to 159.3 billion dollars by 2020.
Public cloud providers include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Amazon.com and Salesforce.com. As the name implies, a private cloud is where companies implement their own cloud environment to support its own needs. A virtual private cloud is simply a private cloud located within a public cloud.
Forrester is not the only analyst firm that expects big things for cloud computing. The Gartner Group projected that the cloud computing industry will have revenue of 148.8 billion dollars by 2014, even higher than Forrester’s forecast of 118.7 billion dollars for the same year. Clearly, the benefits of the cloud are causing many organizations to consider it as a viable option for storing and managing critical data.
What does that mean from an eDiscovery perspective? That means a forecast for more clouds. If your organization doesn’t have a plan in place for managing, identifying, preserving and collecting data from its cloud solutions, things could get stormy!
So, what do you think? Is your organization storing more data in the cloud? Does your organization have an effective plan in place for getting to the data when litigation strikes? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
