The worldwide cloud computing market is expected to grow at a 36 per cent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2016, reaching a market size of $19.5 billion, according to Gartner, a technology research firm.

These figures point out that CIOs are aware of the new business models, consumption models, user expectations, security issues and privacy concerns associated with the cloud and they will use it to drive growth and innovation throughout their organisations, said Marcus Jewell, vice president, EMEA at Brocade, a leading networking solutions company.

Jewell, predicting the top technology trends that Middle Enterprises should watch out for in 2014, said that network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined ‘everything’ will gain momentum.

Globally, and in the Middle East, exploration of NFV and software-defined technologies (network, virtualisation, data centre, storage and infrastructure) will evolve from being simply ‘research,’ and enterprises – particularly in the service provider space – will begin to roll out production deployments.

The industry is shifting toward an open, more flexible, efficient, highly programmable and elastic network infrastructure solutions with key initiatives such as OpenStack and the Open Daylight Project as well as disruptive technologies, he stated.

Technology disruptions are forcing the company to fundamentally rethink how networks should be architected, designed, deployed and operated in data centres, said Jewell. The explosion of data is forcing an end to the traditional three-tier network and with Gartner predicting that by 2014, 80 per cent of network traffic will flow from server to server, Middle East enterprises are expected to continue to flatten their networks.

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, stated that the power of a network will increase by the square of the number of nodes connected to it.

According to IDC, the total ‘Internet of Things’ market including technologies and services will be $8.9 trillion by 2020, with 212 billion devices connected to the Internet, changing networking forever.

The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend and the explosion of data are causing many new challenges as the amount of data becomes too big to handle in terms of getting value from it and in defining a strategy, said Jewell.

He pointed out that enterprises in the Middle East will go back to basics in 2014 and ask fundamental questions of their data centre infrastructures as they look to deal with unprecedented data volumes. - TradeArabia News Service