Cloud computing is poised to continue its seemingly inexorable growth in the year ahead, but the model remains a far cry from maturity. We can expect to see cloud services fall short in three main areas this year, warns Galen Gruman at InfoWorld.

The first area we should expect to see cloud providers mess up is, no surprise, security. The majority of providers don't have a good handle on the complexity and cost of security, despite the marketing rhetoric that is lofted, Gruman cautions. To make matters worse, customers are clamoring for business functionality, not security, fueling a de-prioritization of security by providers.  lan on reading about some major hacks this year.

Next, cloud providers will continue pitching migration as "cheap and easy," but it isn't. This leads businesses to underestimate the expense and wind up over budget, which leads to project failures. "As a result, the business may give up prematurely and waste the investment, IT and/or the vendor may cut corners to rein in the expenses at the price of bigger problems later, and so on," he writes.

Finally, despite the above-mentioned downsides, cloud users are multiplying and sooner or later--probably in late 2012, according to Gruman--this will take a toll on performance. As providers attempt to keep prices down and compete for more customers, less investment will be made on the infrastructure upgrades needed to support them. At that point, everyone will likely feel the pain.

For more:
- see Galen Gruman's post at InfoWorld

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