4. Mobility (2012-2015)

According to Paquet, we have entered a new era of personal computing – and it’s a mobile one. The majority of PCs today are notebooks and laptops, and many people also have smartphones and tablets. Users want to be able to share their information and access it across multiple devices. The easiest way to do that lies in the cloud. In the next few years, says Paquet, the cloud will replace the PC as the place where we store our personal content.

The problem with this shift? More data stored in the cloud puts more pressure on our data centers, which are already suffering from information overload (see trends 2 and 3). Other complications are going to occur when the enterprise takes on the mobility trend. Devices are essentially user-controlled, and to that end, IT departments will need to develop bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, security concerns or not.

App developers face a separate issue. In the past, you could assume that users would be running an application in a Windows system on a desktop or laptop. Now developers need to design applications that run on a variety of devices and operating systems. While HTML5 web apps offer one way to solve that problem, many users still prefer a native app environment.

Read about the future of hybrid clouds on the next page

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