This year has been a significant one for enterprise cloud adoption, and 2012 will be even more so. There are a few predictions that outline the general direction towards which the industry is headed, highlighting a few key indicators that will play the most significant roles in this movement.

One of the forecasts comes from Red Hat. The Linux distributor sees a lot of learning and innovation down the road, along with some more specific trends. One of them is big data, something the company has put money on. Shortly after acquiring Gluster for $136 million, the company introduced a storage appliance specifically designed for analytics jobs.

From a broader point of view, the growing collection of open-source cloud solutions is yet another trend. OpenStack is turning into a foundation of its own in 2012 due to pressure from some of the bigger players in the cloud OS’s already massive ecosystem, and Cloud Foundry is gaining momentum. Foundry is VMware’s open-source PaaS, which debuted in April , and it already managed to rack up some achievements since then, including the title of the overall best PaaS.

“2012 will be the year of ‘Big’ – Big Data, Big Storage and Replication, Big Virtualization, and by extension Big Networks,” says Raj Kanaya.  “These trends will lead to a strong resurgence in the currently anemic infrastructure market, favoring vendors who are solving real problems.”

Infineta’s worked hard in 2011 to build new technologies around its big data expectations, optimizing WAN interactions and making its services more accessible with pay-as-you-go options earlier this year.  The enterprise is a major target for companies like Infineta when it comes to cloud tech adoption, and we’ll continue to see innovation in the form of new products and services as we head into 2012.

Another key driver towards the new cloud model is the consumerization of IT and BYOD. Organizations are adopting “bring your own device” (and “bring your own apps”) policies at a growing rate across many industries. One of the best examples from this year is IBM, which announced plans to roll out such a policy on a massive scale. About 100k employees can already use their own devices at work, and IBM will add another 100,000 in 2012. This brings us to yet another major aspect of the cloud: security.

IBM revealed a new platform designed to handle this element, which has already proven to be an imperative factor in every section of enterprises’ cloud infrastructure.