Deciding to move on to a cloud means moving your data into somebody’s computers. To develop your computing facilities without investing in hardware and infrastructure is what cloud computing all about. In an organization, you may be the decision maker thanking about whether to put your data in a third party cloud or in your own cloud. You can have a look at the following advantages and disadvantages of cloud so that you can make an informed decision on whether you should switch over to third party cloud infrastructures.
Advantages of cloud
- Reduction in costs: as you do not have to invest in new hardware, you can save a significant amount of IT budget and invest that money in your core business.
- On demand capacity increase– for time sensitive application and services you can easily scale up your computing capacity from the provider’s cloud management console. For example, if you discover that your traffic to your e-commerce site is increasing steadily each month and need to scale up capacity, you can do so within a few minutes from the management console, without thinking about purchasing new hardware. And when you have over capacity, you can scale it down anytime.
- Continuity of operation: you never have to think about business continuity of your service because in a cloud environment you can run multiple instances of your application. Even if the data center in one geo-graphic location goes off-line you can continue the service from the other location where you have another instance of your apps running.
- Focus on your business mission: cloud helps businesses to concentrate more on your business mission because all of your IT headache can be transferred to the provider. You do not have to worry about hardware and capacity issues.
- Cost effective way to leverage best breed of technology and skills
To build servers for specific types of application, you need skilled people and the right technology at your disposal. You can leverage the best of the both world in a cloud environment without spending a dime hiring technical people because the cloud providers already have expertise needed to manage and support the technology used to build the system needed to fit your application’s requirements.
- Reduced headcount
Cloud helps to reduce your IT head counts as you do not need technical experts for everything to support your infrastructure and applications.
Disadvantages of cloud:
First of all your business will be exposed to a third party companies. The fact is your business data will physically resides on the service provider’s computers.
- Contracts and obligations: by putting your applications in the cloud you may think that your application is safe. But don’t forget the application needs maintenance and the OS needed to host the apps need to be managed and patched regularly. So, if you do not make sure who is responsible for the security of your apps you are in sure trouble. Therefore, when signing a contract with cloud service provider makes it clear what are yours and your cloud providers’ obligations in terms of cloud security, data privacy and management..
- Loss of skills: it is for sure that you may not need skilled engineering anymore since your cloud provider is going to offer you everything. Though it is not that difficult to get an engineer, it is really difficult to find a skilled engineer and someone who is familiar with your IT environment. So, in the future if you decide to build any new systems or develop any new infrastructure, you have to start from scratch.
- Data migration capabilities– when you keep you data in the in-house environment, you can migrate data without any restriction. It may not be possible to migrate data the same way when you go for cloud.
