Picture credit: “Clouds – Summer 2014” by “Pam Broviak”, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Cloud computing is one of the 10 strategic technology trends for 2015, according to analysis from Gartner.

The findings were presented by analysts at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo earlier this week. Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one “with the potential for significant impact on the organisation in the next three years.”

David Cearley is vice president and Gartner Fellow. He says there are three main themes with 2015 tech trends; the merging of the real and virtual worlds; the technology impact of the digital business shift; and ‘intelligence everywhere’.

The latter point can be seen in a few of the trends; computing everywhere, the Internet of Things, and smart machine learning. In other words, computational power is moving away from the device.

Naturally, cloud and client computing will be a key element of this. For 2015, Gartner argues, the focus will be on promoting centrally coordinated applications that can port across multiple devices.

“Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style,” said Cearley.

“While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favour apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.”

This more sophisticated definition of cloud computing is in stark contrast to cloud’s position in the latest Gartner hype cycle, where it was stuck firmly in the ‘trough of disillusionment’.

Gartner has made various predictions about cloud computing in the past, with varied degrees of success. By 2015, the analyst house predicts the death of the traditional sourcing model of IT, as well as well as a move to cloud office systems.

Other trends include software-defined apps and infrastructure, web-scale IT, advanced analytics, and 3D printing.

Read more about Gartner’s prognosis here.