Community cloud: There is public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. And then there is the community cloud. The term is not new, but Gartner predicts that it will increase in popularity and use in the coming years. Community clouds are organized by a vendor for a group of like organizations. For example, the New York Stock Exchange has recently set up a cloud for financial service organizations involved with the NYSE, Gartner says. Community clouds allow the organizers to set up parameters that are tailored to the users of the service, allowing for potential economies of scale. There are some concerns, though. If there is a retail community cloud, for example, the service provider may have trouble meeting the demand from all of the retailers it serves during the peak holiday shopping season. And users should beware, Gartner warns: Vendors may attempt to position themselves as a community cloud without offering specialized services specifically for that industry, but charging a premium for that service.

Cloudbursting: Imagine that when your on-premise IT architecture needed extra capacity, for the launch of a product or a sudden, unexpected spike in traffic to your website, that it would automatically add cloud-based resources to meet that peak demand. Such is the technology that cloudbursting could enable, and Gartner says it is coming soon. The two most common use cases are the one described above, or transitioning workloads to a cloud-based environment to free up on-premise capacity for mission critical services. Today, there are ways to enable this capability, but it is mostly done manually, Gartner says, and additional maturation of the technology is needed. It's in the early-enough stages that the term has not yet become over-hyped. "Standards for the seamless exchange of workloads, security and SLA requirements between alternative providers have not yet matured. For this reason, automation of this process will initially be tied to a specific vendor's implementation or will likely require migration/conversion, or, alternatively, the use of identical technologies in both locations," Gartner says.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.