Businesses could benefit from investing in private cloud technology.
Firms investing in secure online document storage might be interested in the latest predictions from Opsview.
The company, which is an open source platform that delivers enterprise scale network, server, applications and cloud monitoring, explained that many businesses are likely to switch to private cloud computing in the future.
Product manager James Peel noted that the world of cloud computing is still in its infancy and IT experts are still working out how best to use it in terms of document storage and for running applications.
"The cloud environments are still quite immature at the moment – the vendors and consumers are still understanding this stuff. Technology is adapting – at the moment you’ve got the public cloud, but there is this idea of private clouds and that’s tied into virtualisation," he said.
According to the expert, some of the world’s biggest businesses could be among the first to investigate the benefits of running their own cloud records storage system.
"What’s also going to happen in larger enterprises is that you’ll see cloud-like technologies being deployed within their own data centres, so they have control over it but it gives the flexibility for departments or development teams to provision their own infrastructure without having to go through the IT hierarchy but done in a more controlled way," Mr Peel added.
"That’s probably the long-term answer to [giving employees flexibility, with] the adoption of private clouds."
Businesses planning to invest in secure document storage might find that it helps them reduce their carbon footprint.
A recent Carbon Disclosure Project study found that the uptake of cloud computing could reduce carbon emissions by 9.2 million tonnes per year among UK businesses by 2020 – a figure that would shave £1.2 billion off annual energy prices.