Where will cloud take us in 2014?

Suddenly all the world is cloud but it almost happened without anyone noticing.

Last year, I wrote a piece that explained the marketing hype about the year of the cloud' was, well, marketing hype. I said that we weren't going to see a mass movement of cloud into data centres, but that it would gradually be adopted: bit by bit, application by application, business department by business department.

There were plenty of inhibitors that stood in the way of cloud adoption. Security was always a good one no-one could ever trust the cloud. That objection has become weaker of the years and vanished in 2013, the minute the CIA put its trust in Amazon and signed up the company to run its infrastructure.

How about, no-one will ever trust the cloud for mission-critical business applications. That objection vanished the minute that Australian bank Suncorp decided to move everything to the public cloud. As the CIO says: "We didn't want to waste our time deciding which applications to move and which ones to keep on-premise, so we just decided to move everything."

The decision not only gives the lie to the notion that cloud is not for mission critical applications but gives the lie to the idea that it's not for banks and that moving everything in one go is too difficult.

One of the ways that cloud is going to shake up IT in 2014 is that there will be a lot more of this. The argument about flexibility, about cost control, about managing updates has been won.

What we're going to see happen is a growing number of companies will reject the excuses and starting moving wholesale to the cloud legacy software and all. Undoubtedly, one of the challenges that's going to be faced is the shortage of specific cloud skills it's a topic that comes up time and again when discussion about the future of cloud is raised.