Many organizations, at least on a small level, have embraced cloud computing, however, others have remained hesitant. In this blog we are going to touch on some of the main reasons some organizations are not jumping on the bandwagon just yet.
Cost: Many organizations have an existing investment for in-house and customized middle-ware applications and when looking to move these functions to the cloud they find the implementation, transition, and integration costs are not feasible, nor in their immediate budgets. This becomes less of an issue as systems get older and applications start requiring upgrades.
Legacy Architecture: Many organizations have legacy architecture that does not transition to the cloud very well. This would mean a complete overhaul of the legacy architecture to even support the applications in the cloud. The shear resources involved in such a transition are keeping many organizations from moving forward with cloud initiatives.
Security Risks: This category encompasses a large number of today’s organizations. Business leaders are concerned about data loss, privacy, compliancy, intellectual property theft, and other general security concerns. While these are all valid concerns, many are overlooking the other risks in this category. Shared resources, or multitenancy, can be a major risk because with resource sharing, someone else’s application can utilize all of the resources on the host, in turn affecting everyone else.
Interoperability: This is a major roadblock due to the fact there are virtually no standards between different cloud providers and therefore most providers don’t play well together. Instead of being locked into a single cloud provider, business leaders are demanding the freedom to switch as computing needs evolve. Furthermore, from an operations standpoint this could become a nightmare in trying to manage software without tools that interoperate in support of the system. This is a major hurdle and likely will not be resolved in the near future.
Availability: Once your organization transitions to a public cloud provider, redundancy and fault tolerance are now in the hands of the provider. During an outage your organization has no control over the outcome or resolution. Cloud providers tend not to even share how such situations are handled. As the cloud applications evolve, we see this risk becoming less and less, however.
Let’s be honest, cloud computing is not really a new concept but rather a new term for something that many have been doing for years. The challenges outlined here may or may not pertain to your organization and furthermore, not all applications in your organization. Chances are most organizations will be participating in some type of cloud computing in the near future despite these challenges. If you want to discuss your cloud initiatives please contact us or call 800-557-0663. Please watch for another blog we will be posting in the future discussing the benefits of cloud computing for your organization.
