Mobile Devices and the Cloud
The mobile device market and the cloud are dependent on each other to continue building revenues streams. Using the cloud as a method to deliver applications and data on any device securely will only empower the cloud and embrace its use going forward. The two markets compliment each other perfectly and the industry data is beginning to suggest that this trend is here to stay. A report by Gartner suggests that personal computers only make up about 13% of the computing devices sold last year. This massive downshift in using local resources to run applications suggests that the cloud adaptation will continue on the uptick.
When you think about mobile devices, they really aren’t made for computing large amounts of data and if you have a mobile device that does do this, it probably consumes a lot of power and it doesn’t stay charged for very long. In the next five years, you can expect a total cloud adaption where the cloud takes care of the infrastructure and data storage and developers work more on user interface operations that highlight their applications effectiveness.
Economically for the consumer, using the cloud to store the data that they’ve traditionally stored locally on their mobile devices gives them a feeling a security knowing that they’ll never have to worry about misplacing a micro SD chip ever again. Since many cloud file storage sites such as DropBox are free to use, the notion of spending money on a chip for additional memory seems to be a waste of resources. From a performance perspective, using the cloud offloads processing power therefore mobile devices will be able to sustain a much longer battery life. The cloud has increased its market share significantly over the past few quarters and this pace is only expected to accelerate as mobile devices and the cloud become more dependent upon each other to succeed.
