5 things we love and 5 things we hate about cloud computing

What it offers

Today, growth of a business increases complexity, data and expenditure in IT infrastructure of any organization. Moreover, every other day organizations face the challenge of upgrading their IT infrastructure to keep in pace with the changes taking place in terms of technology and business processes.

cloud computing

This leads to unwanted and risky investments, which if go wrong can bring down the biggest empires in no time. So, the call of the day is to develop a dynamic infrastructure which offers ease of scalability, flexibility whilst meeting the key business objectives. Go for Cloud Computing, a provision of providing computational resources as per the requirement form a remote computer network.

Common software, functionality add-ins or other business applications can be used via internet. Putting it in layman terms, internet serves as a cloud of several applications that can be utilized by subscribing with the service provider. You can avail a plethora of services with cloud computing such as customer relationship management (CRM), HR, accounting, sales force or office automation programs, web services, data storage services, spam filtering, or even blog sites.

Today, businesses can fly high without an expenditure on IT infrastructure. Customize these applications as per the requirement at that moment of time. Cloud Computing allows you to cut off financial waste, better track employee activities, and avert technological problems such as computer viruses, system crashes, and loss of data.

Things we love

Cloud Computing has so much to offer, that you can’t resist falling in love with it. It provides toady’s enterprises with edge cutting capabilities to sail smoothly in highly competitive scenarios.

Manageability

The biggest advantage of Cloud Computing is manageability it offers to the user. Now, you can track several activities as well as important information that could prove very critical to the success of any organization. All the information is visible in an assorted manner enabling the user to drive decisive conclusions. Moreover, the entire organization gets aware of the company objectives and canalized their efforts to achieve the same.

Elimination of on-site servers:

Now, there is no need to invest time on frustrating implementation, maintenance, and upgrade projects that add no value to the company’s bottom line. Traditional way of deploying servers containing company’s software used to occupy tremendous space, thus, increasing the cost. With Cloud Computing, you get rid of the responsibility to manage hardware & software as the servers are deployed off-site on a remote server. This results in reduction in cost, lead time and maintenance.

Return on Investment

Increase your return on investment as you pay only for what you require. The upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy. All you need to do is to open a browser, log in, customize the application you want to use and start. It brings down the investment & operating cost whilst increasing the revenue. With cloud computing you can expect faster break even & ROI.

Greater degree of flexibility:

Cloud Computing imparts greater degree of flexibility in the business. It offers several business applications that are very mobile and collaborative. Customize applications as per the requirement and define bandwidth along with modifying number of users. On-the-fly, point-and-click customization and report generation for business users allows greater levels of flexibility and improved decision making.

Reduction in hardware:

The most striking thing about the Cloud Computing technology is that it requires significantly fewer capital expenditures to get up and running. You can virtualize your infrastructure to cud down the cost incurred in purchase of hardware, its installation, implementation and maintenance. Moreover, one can also avail significant savings in administrative costs.

Things we hate:

Just like the two faces of a coin, Cloud Computing has some alarming issues that need to be understood. Along with several advantages this technology, there are many threats as well. As this technology has not reached maturity and development & research still going on, no one knows what level of complexity this technology will get into.

Shared Technology Issues

The biggest concern over the Cloud Computing technology is that all the information of an organization is shared on a remote server. Moreover, virtual machines or OS created by virtualization hypervisors is prone to technological flaws which can affect any organization.

Data Loss or Leakage

The biggest concern that haunts the advocates if cloud computing is the security issues. Organizations have no control over the business data assets that can be very critical. Moreover, security, privacy and compliance is still quite complex and difficult for cloud solutions. Last but not the least improper backups or system failures can also lead to the risk of data. Cloud Computing suffers from issues such as insufficient authentication, authorization or audit controls, operational failures, and data center reliability.

Dependency (loss of control)

Cloud Computing suffer from several quality issues with CSP as the organization has no control over the maintenance levels and frequency. With little knowledge about CSP contingency procedures such like backup, restoration and disaster recovery the control lies in the hands of the CSP Tied to financial health of another company leaving the former one without any control.

Knowledge & Integration Knowledge

One must have sound knowledge about cloud computing to implement and manage SLA contracts. As overall working of the cloud including hardware, software, virtualization and deployment is based on CSP, integration becomes a challenge. Moreover, hardware integration also becomes very difficult to achieve.

Via: Cloud Computing Boot Camp/Video Army/InformationManagement