2014 has been an exciting year for cloud computing, for both those providing infrastructure and services and those using those solutions. The cloud is evolving to meet the needs of end users and enterprises and infrastructure and services are also transforming as service providers better understand how to meet customer demands efficiently and cost effectively. 2015 promises to be a standout year for the cloud, with adoption rates expected to rise significantly and with increased usage will offer challenges and milestones.

Skyhigh Networks, which specializes in helping IT departments securely enable and adopt cloud services, has made some predictions about what will happen in the cloud computing realm in 2015. The company has based their observations on their own experiences with enterprise customer adoption as well as some of the security and other challenges they have observed and dealt with firsthand.

One of Skyhigh’s top predictions is consumer cloud services will successfully enter the enterprise in the coming year. This will be based on employee demand for enterprise iterations of their favorite consumer cloud apps, and service providers like Dropbox and Facebook are expected to have more visibility in the enterprise space. That assertion certainly goes along with a recent survey from Redshift Research on behalf of NaviSite, which reveals that enterprise confidence in IaaS is growing and solutions like DaaS and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) are gaining popularity, driven by worker demands for mobility and BYOD.

Another important observation from Skyhigh is that the enterprise has become more confident in public cloud IaaS. And one of the key tipping points has been proven security, auditing and visibility from the top cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft. This also plays into worker demand for BYOD and the realization that it’s nearly impossible to secure devices, so enterprises have been more focused on securing data. And that means security will improve as data travels both to and from the cloud, as well as when it resides in the cloud.

Data management and big data are also important cloud drivers and Skyhigh predicts that 2015 will be a major year for management of distributed data across cloud services. Big data analytics will also gain importance, not only for the treasure trove of corporate strategy information they contain, but because they can help predict and identify security attacks to better protect important data and assets.

Finally, as with most trends, the public-facing perception has played an important role in transforming the cloud this year, and will continue to do so in 2015. Major security breaches at Target and Home Depot have put the heat on CEOs and high-level decision makers to pay attention to the cloud. That means there will be closer collaboration with CIOs and CTOs moving forward, and these roles will become more prominent within the enterprise as the cloud continues to gain traction.