A growing number of organizations are moving towards cloud due to big data, privacy concerns, and security issues. The reason behind opting out for cloud services is its multitude benefits including agility, scalability, business growth, cost benefits, and innovation.
According to Gartner, public cloud services market is projected to grow by 18 percent in 2017, reaching $246.8 billion in size (which is up from $209.2 billion in 2016).
Despite its opportunities and benefits, the challenges and risks are outnumbered. Organizations all over the world are investing in the cloud to address problems. The issues such as availability, connectivity, and security observance are some of the potential risks to deal with.
According to RightScale State of the Cloud report 2016, (which surveyed 930 IT professionals) security is no longer a top concern, but some of the traits of cloud like adopting the right skills, expertise and managing costs continue to grow as an obstacle.
Challenges and risks associated with cloud come in all forms and dimensions, depending on the nature of the business. Despite being full of challenges and risks, it does not make it less important. If it would have been less important, there were not any chances of survival until now.
Have a look at few of the statistics that would help you identify the challenges and concerns of cloud computing across various organizations.
– Lack of resources, the top cloud challenge in 2016, is less of a challenge in 2017. Only 25 percent citing it as a major concern, down from 32 percent in 2016.
– Concerns about security also fell to 25 percent vs. 29 percent last year.
– The most cited challenge among mature cloud users is managing costs (24 percent).
– Among enterprises, respondents run 32 percent of workloads in public cloud and 43 percent in private cloud.
– Respondents run 41 percent of workloads in public cloud and 38 percent in private cloud.
If you are deploying cloud strategy in your organization, make sure to consider consequences that would affect directly or indirectly on your business.
Let us have a look at some of the top challenges of cloud implementation.
1. Data Security and Privacy
Data security and protection is one of the leading concerns in cloud computing. The cloud service is hosted by cloud service provider, which transfer user’s security and privacy control to the cloud vendor. The risk associated with the transfer of security and privacy control to the third party is that the information is shared outside.
It is important for the service provider to know how important the security is for the end user. Hence, the major concern for the service provider is to realize the data security and privacy of the end user.
2. Cyber Attacks
The cloud-based service provider has to deal with another fear which is somewhat related to cyber-attack. The data stored online is always possessed with the risk of cyber-attack and that is true when it comes to cloud storage. The size of the data stored in the cloud is vulnerable to cyber-attacks leading to the risk of losing data.
The increased level of threats is mostly due to recurring attacks by bot malware, brute force attacks and virtual machines. Thorough assessment on the service provider’s security measures against these harmful attacks is helpful in determining the level of security offered for the data on the cloud. Regardless of how high the security measures are taken, cyber-attacks are always on the verge.
3. Service Quality
Service quality is also one of the biggest factors considered by enterprises and for this reason, they don’t shift their business application to the cloud. They fear that the cloud service providers do not provide any guarantee to ensure product applications security keeps the organizations away from having it.
Moreover, performance, scalability, and availability are some of the other noted factors for the enterprises. The enterprises get the refund for service and time the service was down. However, a number of SLAs now cover the overall business loss. Without proper service quality, the enterprise will never think of hosting the business infrastructure on the cloud.
4. Performance and Bandwidth Cost
Enterprises can cut down on the cost and save money on acquiring systems, management, database management systems, and maintenance. It is not commonly a problem with the smaller applications, but the cost can get higher for the data-intensive applications. Delivering and receiving exhaustive and intricate data over the network needs sufficient bandwidth to hold off latency and application timeouts.
5. Incorporating with Existing Infrastructure
One of the most challenging and difficult parts in adopting cloud system is the amalgamation of existing infrastructure to the cloud. A large number of organizations are already facing the challenges of adopting cloud strategy including “Bring Your Own Device”.
Moreover, the added benefits that are reaped from introducing discrete cloud services into an organization will never achieve what a well-integrated environment can deliver. Forming a solid strategy is vital, as it will be helpful in governance strategy first at the corporate level and within IT.
6. Governance and Control
It is important to have proper IT governance to ensure that the assets are used in accordance with policies and procedures. Moreover, make sure that these assets are controlled and maintained, adhering to your organization’s plans and business goals.
The cloud-based system does not allow full control over the provision and operations of infrastructure. It has increased the problems for IT to offer governance, compliance and risk management. To overcome these challenges and uncertainties, IT must go for traditional IT governance and control processes.
Conclusion
The cloud strategies and challenges will vary from one organization to another. Understanding these challenges is important to give serious consideration, adopt the best possible technology, and stay ahead of the competition. Stay safe with your organization’s strategy and data and make the right decision while hiring cloud services.
