“A significant proportion of these revenues represent a migration of enterprise spend from traditional siloed offerings, however, cloud-based services can be a highly effective means of ensuring customer retention through the provision of hosting solutions,” the report said. “Key solutions include messaging, presence, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony.”

   While Juniper’s Mobile Cloud report observed that the platform could offer communication service providers an opportunity to develop double-sided revenues and a share in revenues derived from services, the research firm also warned that cloud-based networks still face key security issues.

   Juniper Analyst and Report Author Windsor Holden highlighted two primary security concerns regarding migration to the cloud — data security and the extent to which such migration represents a demonstrable return on investment. “For data security, concerns extend both to secure access that prevents third parties from amending or stealing data and to secure storage, so that the data hosting company will not lose the stored data. Data outages have the potential to severely impact cloud-based services unless data redundancy is improved and enterprises need to be aware of the physical location of the servers storing their data.”

    These problems could also present new opportunities for cloud security providers, according to Juniper. “If an enterprise makes the decision to store data in the cloud, it is imperative that a solution is in place that can dynamically tag and sort that data to determine which data can go to the cloud and which individuals are permitted to have access to that data,” Holden said in the report.