Here are my thoughts on what we can expect in the cloud space in 2012.

Cloud data will become more insightful for business as a whole

With companies sitting on zetabytes of data, many organizations are in possession of tremendously powerful knowledge and insight about their employees, customers and the world they live in. Companies are beginning to know they could get lift from this data, but few are harnessing it.

In 2012, the buzz around big data will drive the need to consolidate data storage for real-time access.

Once data consolidation happens, we'll open the door to advanced analytics of data. By the end of 2012, we'll begin to see third parties white label private data for aggregate insights, i.e., ADP jobs numbers.

One SaaS outage at a well-known company will cripple business and capture headlines for days

Companies are putting more data in the cloud every day. On an average day, Taleo processes 75 million transactions. However, only two cloud companies today have fully redundant scalability, yet organizations are signing up for new SaaS functions every day. This puts tremendous strain on infrastructures far less robust. At the rate of adoption, it's unlikely that every SaaS vendor will sustain their platform uninterrupted. Look for specific industries' high traffic points such as Q4 for retail, or Q2 for tax prep to be times of intense strain on the cloud, and watch for one to break.

The rising costs of storing data create a data profitability imperative of storing data

The cloud is about to get more expensive as hard drive prices rise in the wake of the 2011 Thai flooding. Remedies include slimming the code that runs applications, slimming the data we keep, or just swallowing the price tag of hard disks, which are in short supply. In 2012, companies will start to look at their data not just as a window into the world of their business, but as a profit center to today to offset the costs of keeping data, and someday to grow the business. Advances in data center technology allow for big data apps at a lower cost of entry for high return business. Could we be looking at Data as a Service?

Enterprises finally decide that the cloud is secure

The alignment of the cloud and security industries is here. Beyond the landmark milestone acquisitions by SAP and Oracle, the channel is realizing their role as counselors to help companies make smart decisions in the move to the cloud, including security. Government customers such as the US Department of Justice are a key indicator that cloud adoption is over the security roadblock.