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Annual revenues derived from mobile cloud-based enterprise services are expected to reach US$39 billion by 2016, according to England-based Juniper Research's new Mobile Cloud report.

The growth in revenues is driven by an increased offer of unified communications (UC) suits to corporate clients by mobile network operators.

A large proportion of these revenues represents a migration of enterprise spends from traditional siloed offerings [to cloud-based services], the report indicated. It suggested cloud-based services can be a highly effective means of ensuring customer retention through the provision of hosting allied to solutions, such as messaging, presence, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony.

 

According to Juniper Research, cloud computing offers communication service providers the opportunity to develop double-sided revenues by opening their APIs (application programming interfaces) to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) providers, and thus share in revenues derived from their services.

 

Enterprises have two primary concerns regarding migration to the cloud: data security and the extent to which such migration represents a demonstrable ROI (return on investment), the report suggested.

For data security, concerns extend both to secure access (that third parties cannot access, amend or steal their data) and to secure storage (that the data hosting company will not lose the stored data).

 

These problems can turn into opportunities for cloud-based security solutions providers, though. "If an enterprise makes the decision to store data in the cloud, it is imperative that a solution is in place that can dynamically tag and sort that data to determine which data can go to the cloud and which individuals are permitted to have access to that data," said Windsor Holden, author of the Mobile Cloud report.

 

And unless data redundancy is improved, data outages will potential impact cloud-based services severely. As such, enterprises are advised to remain highly alert of the physical location of the servers storing their data.