Pros and Cons of cloud computing
Advantages
of Cloud Computing
Cost Savings
Perhaps, the most significant
cloud computing benefit is in terms of IT cost savings. Businesses, no matter
what their type or size, exist to earn money while keeping capital and
operational expenses to a minimum. With cloud computing, you can save substantial
capital costs with zero in-house server storage and application requirements.
The lack of on-premises infrastructure also removes their associated
operational costs in the form of power, air conditioning and administration
costs. You pay for what is used and disengage whenever you like - there is no
invested IT capital to worry about. It’s a common misconception that only large
businesses can afford to use the cloud, when in fact, cloud
services are extremely affordable for smaller businesses.
Reliability
With a
managed service platform, cloud computing is much more reliable and consistent
than in-house IT infrastructure. Most providers offer a Service Level Agreement
which guarantees 24/7/365 and 99.99% availability. Your organization can
benefit from a massive pool of redundant IT resources, as well as quick
failover mechanism - if a server fails, hosted applications and services can
easily be transited to any of the available servers.
Manageability
Cloud
computing provides enhanced and simplified IT management and maintenance
capabilities through central administration of resources, vendor managed
infrastructure and SLA backed agreements. IT infrastructure updates and
maintenance are eliminated, as all resources are maintained by the service
provider. You enjoy a simple web-based user interface for accessing software,
applications and services – without the need for installation - and an SLA
ensures the timely and guaranteed delivery, management and maintenance of your
IT services.
Strategic Edge
Ever-increasing
computing resources give you a competitive edge over competitors, as the time
you require for IT procurement is virtually nil. Your company can deploy
mission critical applications that deliver significant business benefits,
without any upfront costs and minimal provisioning time. Cloud computing allows
you to forget about technology and focus on your key business activities and
objectives. It can also help you to reduce the time needed to market newer
applications and services.
Disadvantages of Cloud Computing
Downtime
As cloud
service providers take care of
a number of clients each day, they can become overwhelmed and may even come up
against technical outages. This can lead to your business processes being
temporarily suspended. Additionally, if your internet connection is offline,
you will not be able to access any of your applications, server or data from
the cloud.
Security
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. Using cloud-powered technologies means you need to
provide your service provider with access to important business data.
Meanwhile, being a public service opens up cloud service providers to security
challenges on a routine basis. The ease in procuring and accessing cloud
services can also give nefarious users the ability to scan, identify and
exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities within a system. For instance, in a
multi-tenant cloud architecture where multiple users are hosted on the same
server, a hacker might try to break into the data of other users hosted and
stored on the same server. However, such exploits and loopholes are not likely
to surface, and the likelihood of a compromise is not great.
Vendor Lock-In
Although
cloud service providers promise that the cloud will be flexible to use and
integrate, switching cloud services is something that hasn’t yet completely
evolved. Organizations may find it difficult to migrate their services from one
vendor to another. Hosting and integrating current cloud applications on
another platform may throw up interoperability and support issues. For
instance, applications developed on Microsoft Development Framework (.Net)
might not work properly on the Linux platform.
Limited Control
Since
the cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed and monitored by the
service provider, it transfers minimal control over to the customer. The
customer can only control and manage the applications, data and services
operated on top of that, not the backend infrastructure itself. Key
administrative tasks such as server shell access, updating and firmware
management may not be passed to the customer or end userIt is easy to see how
the advantages of
cloud computing easily
outweigh the drawbacks. Decreased costs, reduced downtime, and less management
effort are benefits that speak for themselves.
Cloud computing is
defined as a type of computing that relies on sharing
computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications.
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