There are many powerful advantages to the use of cloud computing for your business or organisation. However, with advantages there are inevitably some disadvantages to consider also. We will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of using cloud computing here.
Advantages
- Speed to deploy
- Costs
- Simplified Manageability
- Reliability
- Scalability
Speed to Deploy
In the ever changing and speedy pace of today’s industry and technology world having the ability to respond quickly to events, demands, consumers or competition is a must. Cloud Computing enables you to spin up infrastructure and systems incredibly quickly to respond. It also enables you to increase the infrastructure you have available to deal with peaks of demand.
Costs
Cloud computing enables the charging model to be on-demand, you pay for what you use. Because the infrastructure you are utilising is ‘shared’ with other users then the provider has means to record usage nad metrics against your account, be that cloud storage, compute cycles or licences for software. These metrics enable the provider to spread the cost of the infrastructure and management of it across users in a ‘per-unit’ manner meaning you pay for what you use. A very flexible and cost effective way for your business to harness the power of large scale infrastructure without the need to invest heavily up front in building that capability – you can simply leverage the cloud providers existing investment.
Simplified Manageability
The cost of running technology and infrastructure is expensive, the licences, the skilled resources, the infrastructure, the networking it all adds up. Managing the different layers and complicated relationships between hardware, storage, networks and the software applications your business relies on is a management headache. Cloud computing takes a lot of the headache of manageability away as it is provided by the cloud service provider. All you get presented with is the Operating system prompt (PaaS) or Software Application login you need (SaaS) making having this capability available to your business a lot simpler. The advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing need to be considered around manageability.
Reliability
Having your own on-premise technology and solution means support headaches and when something goes wrong, it’s your problem to solve. Not only that but in order to keep the systems that underpin your business or organisation healthy and up to date you need to take them down to maintain them, patch them and keep them secure. The windows of opportunity to achieve this in a modern business are few and far between, the alternative is to invest in more infrastructure to enable more resilience but increasing costs, complexity and management demand. Cloud computing helps by enabling the cloud provider to invest in the resilient and highly available infrastructure and skilled resources whose key skills and focus is on ensuring your business has maximum uptime without the hassle.
Scalability
Elastic Demand is a key focus for many cloud computing platforms. This gives the ability to turn on additional compute or storage power as demand requires and then scale this back as demand dissipates. For a single business to manage it has to build infrastructure to deal with it’s highest peak, even if the normal run-rate of the business is to use a fraction of that peak for the rest of the year.
Disadvantages
- Downtime
- Security
- Evergreen / Control
Downtime
We talked of reliability as an advantage, there is also the risk of downtime. There are stories in the press that we all hear of even the largest and most reliable cloud providers (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) experiencing ‘outages’ where all of their service is rendered unavailable. That’s a terrible impact to the provider but consider what that would do to your business if you area tenant on one of these cloud services. How long could you cope with no access to the systems and software that run your billing, bookings, calendar, email. Having contingency and disaster recovery plans for your business is ever more important where you trust your key infrastructure to another party (i.e. your cloud services provider) and the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing need to be weighed up very carefully.
Security
As we hear time and again around privacy and hacking stories in the trade and public press, nothing is 100% secure. Whilst the cloud providers will invest in higher standards and more expensive and capable security systems and measures than you might be able to afford in running your own infrastructure, there are still no guarantees that your data will not be lost, corrupted or hacked. Information security and management for your business must always be top of mind especially where your trust your data to the cloud.
Evergreen / Control
Where you are using the software provided by a cloud provider you gain advantage by not having the headache of running the solution. You must also consider the loss of control in when and how that software is updated and upgraded or modified. Oracle runs a large scale ERP software stack that thousands of businesses rely on to manage their inventory, finances and HR workforce. Every three months Oracle issues a patching cycle and upgrades its cloud servers and customers are then using the new version. If this changes something and means a process in your business needs to adapt or change then you have no control over the cause of that change as you have passed that control to the provider of your software or solution.
So forward planning and understanding what’s coming in each release or upgrade and its impact on you is critical to avoid surprises impacting your business.
