While cloud computing challenges do exist, if properly addressed, these issues don’t mean your IT roadmap has to remain anchored on-premise. In the End – the Cloud Still Wins. To make the best out of it and overcome issues, you should take a strategic iterative approach to implementation, explore hybrid cloud solutions, involve business and IT teams, invest in a CIO, and choose the right cloud partner.
Security breaches
understanding what cloud computing security, is is extremely important, according to the Cloud consultant, cloud computing security or, more simply, cloud security refers to a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing.
Mustafa who specializes in creating safe migration plans, designing the orchestrations plans and determining the optimal source cloud (whether Virtual, Physical or Cloud-based) for his client’s needs, states that security risks of cloud computing have become the top concern in 2019. security has indeed been a primary, and valid, concern from the start of cloud computing technology: Customers are unable to see the exact location where your data is stored or being processed. This increases the cloud computing risks that can arise during the implementation or management of the cloud. Headlines highlighting data breaches, compromised credentials, and broken authentication, hacked interfaces and APIs, account hijacking haven’t helped alleviate concerns. Luckily as cloud providers and users, mature security capabilities are constantly improving.
Cost management
Cost management has become a major concern for many businesses and corporations over the years and many small and medium sized enterprises are still reluctant to migrate to cloud because of this. “Enterprises should enlist a number of resources, including cost calculators and third-party tools, to assess what they’ll pay for cloud computing — before they start migration.”
Although companies can save much more in the long run if they shift their workload to the cloud, the initial investment is a big problem for many small companies. However, he does think that it has become mandatory for small companies to move their business functions into cloud as this would help them in analyzing their data more efficiently as they can take advantage of the specialized services on the cloud which integrate back-office operations for marketing and human resource, giving small business owners more time to focus on the important matters.
According to him, despite popular beliefs, cost-cutting is possible on cloud. “ Just because you are on cloud does not mean that you do not need to track your costs, you will actually need to analyze and track your cloud expenditure by correlating it to developers and the projects they are handling, so you understand expected consumption patterns,” he said before adding that this would enable companies to ensure that their resources are provisioned in the most economical way.
Managing multiple clouds
The state of multi-cloud has grown exponentially in recent years. Companies are shifting or combining public and private clouds and, as mentioned earlier, tech giants like Alibaba and Amazon are leading the way.
According to the study by RightScale in 2018, over 80 percent of enterprises today are using a multi-cloud strategy, 51 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy and on average, businesses are using about 4.8 different public and private clouds.
But for all the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, there are some challenges that come with it as well. Specifically it can be difficult to secure a multi-cloud strategy because of a lack of visibility across hosts and services. That makes it easier for hackers to find exploitable vulnerabilities within an organization’s infrastructure and it also makes it more difficult to meet compliance mandates.
Compliance
“Compliance is another risk that cloud computing is facing,” says Mustafa, as everytime a company transfers its data from the internal storage cloud it needs to comply with industry laws and regulations.
Cloud customers need to look for vendors that can provide compliance and check if they are regulated by the standards they need. Some vendors offer certified compliance, but in some cases, additional input is needed on both sides to ensure proper compliance regulations.
Mustafa also pointed out that the other main challenge businesses may face is data compliance. “ As many companies have data centers spread across the globe, data governance and compliance have become a problem, like in the EU nations where not complying by the GDPR rules could lead to hefty fines,” he said.
Performance
When a business moves to the cloud it becomes dependent on the service providers. The next prominent challenges of moving to cloud computing expand on this partnership. Nevertheless, this partnership often provides businesses with innovative technologies they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. On the other hand, the performance of the organization’s BI and other cloud-based systems is also tied to the performance of the cloud provider when it falters. When your provider is down, you are also down.
This isn’t uncommon, over the past couple of years all the big cloud players have experienced outages. Make sure your provider has the right processes in place and that they will alert you if there is ever an issue.
Of course, as cloud services and computing keep developing, so do the risks. This list, according to Mustafa is some of the current burning issues of the platform. But future growth and progress are inevitable and “in the end”, Mustafa concludes “the Cloud still wins”.
Similarly, using multi-cloud means that the company will need experts multiple skill sets to get the maximum out of the Cloud, which means companies will need to invest in a team with multiple skill sets.