Cloud Computing

A Journey Not a Destiny

Most businesses are deploying cloud computing in one form or another, but it’s just one aspect of the bigger move towards is digital transformation. One might also argue it’s something you never fully achieve and is a continual journey.

Our community is here to discuss, debate, promote and rationalise the hype and hyperbole that surrounds one of the most compelling topics of our time – Cloud Computing.

Here we outline cloud computing positives, negatives and how to get the best out of it.

And don’t miss our ultimate Best Practice Guide!

Positives

Agility

The cloud offers access to a broad range of technologies facilitating faster innovation and enablement to build pretty much anything you need. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.

It offers the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business

Elasticity

With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.

Cost savings

The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centres and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.

Deploy globally in minutes

With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.

Negatives

Many organisations benefit from the agility, scale, and pay-per-use billing that cloud services offer. However, as with any infrastructure service, the suitability of cloud computing for your specific use case should be assessed in a risk-based evaluation. Build in time for research and planning to understand how the cloud will affect your business.

Downtime

Since cloud computing systems are internet-based, service outages are always an unfortunate possibility and can occur for any reason.

Unfortunately, no organisation is immune, especially when critical business processes cannot afford to be interrupted. In the past a whole range of companies and services have been it by outages, including Cloudflare (a major web services provider), Google, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, Verizon, and Spectrum.

Security and privacy

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Any discussion involving data must address security and privacy, especially when it comes to managing sensitive data.

Of course, any cloud service provider is expected to manage and safeguard the underlying hardware infrastructure of a deployment. However, your responsibilities lie in the realm of user access management, and it’s up to you to carefully weigh all the risk scenarios.

Vulnerability to attack

In cloud computing, every component is online, which exposes potential vulnerabilities. Even the best teams suffer severe attacks and security breaches from time to time. Since cloud computing is built as a public service, it’s easy to run before you learn to walk. After all, no one at a cloud vendor checks your administration skills before granting you an account: all it takes to get started is generally a valid credit card.

Limited control and flexibility

Since the cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed, and monitored by the service provider, it transfers minimal control over to the customer.

To varying degrees (depending on the particular service), cloud users may find they have less control over the function and execution of services within a cloud-hosted infrastructure. A cloud provider’s end-user license agreement (EULA) and management policies might impose limits on what customers can do with their deployments. Customers retain control of their applications, data, and services, but may not have the same level of control over their backend infrastructure.

Vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in is another perceived disadvantage of cloud computing. Easy switching between cloud services is a service that hasn’t yet completely evolved, and organisations may find it difficult to migrate their services from one vendor to another. Differences between vendor platforms may create difficulties in migrating from one cloud platform to another, which could equate to additional costs and configuration complexities. Gaps or compromises made during migration could also expose your data to additional security and privacy vulnerabilities.

Cost concerns

Adopting cloud solutions on a small scale and for short-term projects can be perceived as being expensive. However, the most significant cloud computing benefit is in terms of IT cost savings. Pay-as-you-go cloud services can provide more flexibility and lower hardware costs, but the overall price tag could end up being higher than you expected. Until you are sure of what will work best for you, it’s a good idea to experiment with a variety of offerings.