This year has seen an incredible adoption of cloud computing and cloud innovation. Organizations have been developing an ever increasing need for secure, reliable and redundant access to the cloud, they now need their information at a moments notice with no downtime. To ensure this they are demanding business continuity and dedicated connectivity to their business critical applications and data. Now let’s take a deeper look into how the cloud ruled 2013.

The cloud has now reached the point where organizations that manage their own IT must consider cloud services, they have become more efficient and more effective than anything a company could integrate themselves. The increased adoption over the past year is no coincidence and here are the leading reasons why:

Cost: The cloud allows managing your IT expenses to be completely simplified. Instead of having multiple capital and operating expenses the cloud allows companies to pay for what they need, when they need it, similar to a utilities bill.

Speed: Provisioning time is cut down to minutes. This allows an organization to pull up more resources when needed in a fraction of the time it would take with an in house infrastructure.

Compliance: Now for many industries such as healthcare or legal this is a major concern when it comes to cloud computing. Laws such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley require companies to know and have control over who can access their data at all times. Some cloud services do not have the proper certifications, so make sure to ask about compliance issues when choosing a cloud provider.

Resources: Focus on your business needs not on IT. The cloud offers just this, IT issues will be handled by the cloud provider leaving employee resources to be focused on more pressing business priorities.

Performance: Applications, web based or otherwise become optimized in the cloud, allowing for increased responsiveness and efficiency within applications.

Accessibility: Now all of the technical and cost saving benefits of the cloud are amazing, but we cannot overlook the benefit of accessibility. The ability to access all of your applications and data from anywhere, anytime on any device is nothing short of incredible.

Madonna reference aside we truly are living in a world run by virtual machines. According to a study performed by Verizon the number of VMs has increased 35% over the past year.

Along with this increase in VMs the data and memory storage demands have also gone through the roof, increasing by 90% and 100% respectively over the past year. Organizations are moving more memory and data intensive applications to the cloud while at the same time optimizing their virtual machines. Today, organizations can deploy the equivalent of three to four servers onto one VM. This advancement allows organizations to deploy multiple applications with high memory and storage demands without having to deploy the same number of virtual machines.

So where does the cloud go from here? The quick answer is that it will continue to innovate and allow organizations to streamline the ways they do business. The early adopters have and will continue to be successful and late comers will suffer.

Current software licensing models are becoming a thing of the past, which is a great thing. Gone will be the days of purchasing multiple licenses for an office. Cloud computing is also fostering open cloud development. This will allow developers to create applications without having to write them in separate code for different operating systems, allowing for smoother deployments and less downtime.

The cloud’s disruptive nature is already ever present. Netflix and blockbuster anyone? It is allowing for all kinds of new innovations and business models and is leading to some very exciting developments such as massive innovations in healthcare, television and gaming.

Over the past year it has become clear what the cloud can offer organizations and people are taking notice. From speed, cost savings and accessibility to its revolutionizing nature one thing is clear, the cloud is here to stay. As companies continue to move their business critical applications to the cloud the job of cloud providers will be to guarantee security and availability for all of that data.