Positive Outlook For Mobile Cloud Apps

New research has pointed to an increasing use of cloud-based mobile applications as revenues from this sector are set to hit $9.5 billion (£5.9 billion) by 2014.

So says Juniper Research in its Mobile Cloud Applications & Services report. The research house says that this revenue growth will be fuelled the need for converged, collaborative services, as well as the widespread adoption of mobile broadband services.

Additional drivers, says Juniper, will be the deployment of technological enablers such as HTML5 and the Open Mobile Alliance’s Smart Card Web Server (SCWS).

With cloud services gaining increasing traction in enterprises, it seems that this will trickle down to cloud-based mobile apps, with enterprise applications expected to account for the majority of revenues over the next five years.

According to Juniper, this means that businesses will “increasingly seeking to capitalise on the ability of Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to offer scalable, flexible data storage solutions allied to device agnostic, synchronised office services.”

However, Juniper also predicts that “consumer-oriented apps will comprise an ever-larger proportion of total revenues, derived both from time-based subscriptions to services such as mobile online gaming and advertising from cloud-based social networks.”

But the analyst house has recognised that the issues the Cloud has introduced, with many enterprises still wary of entrusting their personal data to remote third-parties.

This has not been helped by the recent high-profile data losses amongst corporate mobile users in the USA, which has exacerbated these concerns.

“Not only is it imperative for cloud providers to ensure that access to and storage of customer data is secure, but that the procedures that they put in place in this regard – including data backup strategies – are transparent to the customer,” said report author Dr Windsor Holden.