Mobile-Cloud Combo

BANGALORE, INDIA: Are applications on the cloud being accessed mostly from computers? If your answer is ‘yes’, here are some statistics to make you think again.

According to a recent market survey, the number of smartphones sold worldwide in the first quarter of 2012 is around 144.9 million units. The projected increase of sales in smartphones by 2015 is estimated to be around 982 million units, which is over twice the number of PCs to be sold that year.

With the rise of smartphone usage as a common medium to access information, there has been a proportional increase in the migration of mobile applications to the cloud. Here are some reasons as to why people are moving to the cloud: 

Accessibility to information via multiple devices being the primary. Information once uploaded to the cloud gives the freedom for the user to access it worldwide on the device of his choice. Be it a desktop, laptop, mobile or a tablet, all he needs is a connection to the internet and he has the information delivered right into his hands.

Netflix, which runs its mobile applications on the cloud, states that the acceleration of business speed is one of the main factors for its migration to cloud. Dealing with issues at the operation level eats-up most of the time to market. Letting the cloud provider focus on data centre infrastructure and dealing with platform issues, allows the organization to concentrate more on delivery.

With cloud comes the inherent advantage of automatic scaling and the ‘pay-as-you-use’ model of billing. This turns out to be the most effective means of costing for organizations having issues with scalability and operational maintenance.

Some of the companies which already run their mobile applications on the cloud include instagram, foursquare, netflix and groupon. The question that arises next is about which model of the cloud is best suited for organizations wanting to host their mobile applications?

Market surveys state that the most plausible cloud model for such organizations is ‘PaaS’ since it gives one the freedom from building huge data centres with high maintenance costs, provides quicker scalability, an easier tap into third party enterprises and most importantly — allows more time devoted towards app innovation. The adoption of PaaS for use by mobile apps is estimated to be very large by 2015 with a predicted growth of market size upto $1.7 billion.

The demand for smartphones and hand held devies is showing a steady maturation rate and having cloud by its side is only making it more promising. As the IT market evolves, all eyes are on the next generation of innovative technologies which are going to emerge from the heady mobile and cloud combo!

The author is senior software engineer at Torry Harris Business Solutions.