In order to assess whether cloud computing or cloud storage services are right for you there is a requirement to assess the cloud advantages and disadvantages across multiple areas. Only in analysing these areas can you come to a true judgement on whether moving to cloud is right for you.
The key areas we focus on here are:
- Usability / Interoperability
- Practicality
- Security
- Reliance on Comms/Internet
- Efficiency/Cost Savings
- Migration is complex
- Dev/Test – elasticity
Usability / Interoperability
One advantage of cloud is its ability to overcome interoperability issues. Think as a consumer, you have an iPad, a laptop and a mobile phone yet you want your data in all these devices simultaneously.
Having your calendar available in a single device would not work for how you manage your day and work across these devices.
Now you do not need to know and understand how the different protocols and transfers work, just know that the cloud is the intermediary for the data to synchronise across these devices and to be there when you need it.
Cloud Advantages and Disadvantages – Practicality
From a consumer perspective having to carry around tangible data storage is a risk in both security and loss/damage.
Having your data accessible in the cloud removes the necessity for hardware local storage and improves the resilience of your data. Cloud advantages and disadvantages can revolve around practicality in many factors.
Scale this up to an enterprise level where you have your data dispersed in laptops, memory sticks, hard drives or geographically disparate servers. Moving this to a cloud solution, all in one place makes it easier to protect, organise, manage and secure.
Security
Security can be seen as an advantage in leveraging the ‘cloud services’. Think about the potential disadvantages though.
You are entrusting your data to a bunch of strangers! The staff of this 3rd party cloud provider are not your staff, they have not gone through your on-boarding and vetting processes yet some will have admin rights to your data.
It is possible to encrypt data so that it’s not discernible by the cloud company admins but that introduces support risks with recovering encrypted data and performance overheads in encrypting and decrypting data during use.
Reliance on Communication / Internet
By its very nature a ‘cloud service’ is remote from where you are, hence you have a dependency on communications to be able to reach your cloud service or cloud storage which can be a disadvantage of cloud.
The very advantage of it’s ubiquity is also a potential achilles heel, as without this channel of communication you will not be able to access your services and data.
Communications interruption could come from multiple levels:
- Forgetting your username / password
- Your device or hardware loss or damage
- Mobile signal coverage problems or loss
- Internet disruption to DNS
- DDOS – denial of service attack
- Local area network on-premise failure
- Cloud Provider communications disruption
Modern communications are generally more reliable with high availability and the way we work today means that the applications we use are available on more than one device and we have multiple means to access the internet either view mobile signal, wireless broadband or Home/Work communications.
Efficiency / Cost Saving
A key advantage to cloud is the cost advantage. If you want to access the benefits of cloud computing but don’t have the capital to invest in the hardware, servers, networking, security, data centre, staff, licences, power and heat then public cloud services are your answer.
Someone else has made that capital investment and a much larger scale than just your needs. You get to leverage this investment without spending anything like those sums, while still receiving all the same benefits of cloud computing and storage.
Migration is Complex
In order to take existing systems and services to the cloud can be a complicated undertaking and a disadvantage to cloud. You’ve built your solutions in a way that ‘fits’ you, your data is structured how you need it but now you must change this to gain the benefits of cloud.
A cloud service is built for many and is not as flexible as your on-premise system which you own and control. Your workflows and processes now need to adjust to work with this new cloud solution.
Your data might need adjusting before it can be loaded into and work with this new cloud alternative. In fact one of the most demanding tasks for many organisations is the ‘extract, transform and load’ or ETL steps. This is where you extract your data from your existing system(s), transform it into the format and quality needed for the new system and then load it up to the new system. This is a time consuming process and quite prevalent in cloud advantages and disadvantages come business case justification time.
Dev/Test Elasticity
When developing new systems you have a large team of engineers and testers beavering away to design and create the new solution. This team often needs access to servers and storage and networking that far exceeds your end solution’s infrastructure requirements.
To invest in all this infrastructure to meet the peak of development and testing would be a significant expense. Then comes the question of what do you do with this kit when the solution is live and in use.
An advantage of cloud is the ability to spin-up resources on-demand to meet the peaks and to dial it back and release infrastructure to the cloud when you have finished with it.
This elasticity of demand and supply is a key feature and advantage of cloud services. Many cloud advantages and disadvantages are tied to this on-demand capability.
