Mobile cloud-based enterprise services annual revenues are expected to reach $39bn by 2016 as corporate customers are offered with an array of unified communications suites by mobile network operators, according to Juniper research.
The report said a significant proportion of these revenues indicates a migration of enterprise spend from traditional siloed offerings.
However, it pointed out that cloud-based services can be a highly effective means of ensuring customer retention, through the provision of hosting allied to offerings such as messaging, presence, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony.
Using the cloud, communication service providers get the opportunity to develop double-sided revenues by opening their application programming interfaces to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers.
During the migration to the cloud, enterprises have two primary concerns – data security and the extent to which such migration represents a demonstrable return on investment (ROI), according to the report.
In case of data security, the report said 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.
Report author Windsor Holden said 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.
Cloud-based services are severely impacted due to probable data outages unless there is an improvement in data redundancy.
The report further said enterprises need to be aware of the physical location of the servers storing their data.
