The mobile cloud market, driven by corporate demand, will be worth $39bn by 2016, although security remains a concern, according to a new report from US telecoms analysts Juniper Research.

The ‘Mobile Cloud White Paper’states that most of that figure will be diverted from other budgets within enterprises, as the cloud can be utilised to good effect for customer retention through its messaging, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony functionality.

In addition, the report says the network providers can profit by allowing their developments to be used and distributed by Software-as-a-Service providers and sharing in the revenues made through this route.

Though the report says concerns remain around hacking and data storage, its author, Dr Windsor Holden, suggests that dynamic tagging can be used to determine what data is appropriate to be hosted on the Cloud and who can access it.

Other concerns related to the mobile Cloud include return on investment, data outages and the physical location of the servers storing data.

See juniperresearch.com for the full report.