The coming year could be a challenging time for cloud adopters as about 25 per cent of the top 100 IT service providers may not be around by the end of 2014, according Gartner Research.
As many as three in four cloud providers could be either forced out of business due to bankruptcy or gobbled up by larger companies, the research firm said. At the same time, Gartner also predicted that the number of organizations offering you cloud services will rise by 80 per cent by the beginning of 2014.
At the moment, providers are under great pressure to cut cost, said Gartner analyst William Maurer, as he told attendees at the Gartner Data Centre Conference in Las Vegas to give their cloud providers a chance to “make some money.”
“You need to make sure that your service providers are successful,” he said. “…Don’t take all the money off the table because if you do, you are not going to have a lot of them around.”
The cloud service market is a ‘buyer beware” arena, according to one of the conference attendees, Michael Salvador, technical solutions manager for networking products firm Belden Inc. He said adopters need to do their research carefully because there is “no safety net out there.”
Salvador said concerns about cloud risks could prompt some customers to seek out larger vendors even if smaller providers may offer better prices and additional guarantees that big providers do not.
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