The technology market world-wide is migrating to Cloud Computing where
many organizations host and run most of their applications on cloud
infrastructure. Cloud computing is a means to utilize the cloud infrastructure
or any cloud hosted software by subscription or pay-per-use service.
If you are migrating your applications to a public or private cloud,
as always cloud solution providers may promise you—easy and fast deployment, high-end
security, lower cost and more. But at this juncture, it is of utmost importance
to be aware of the critical factors to be considered while migrating to cloud beyond
all the marketing proclamations.
Integration Issues with Cloud Computing
It is
imperative for companies to think about the Integration going in, while
deciding to embrace a SaaS based application or PaaS model for any of your
software requirement. Integration plays a vital role when companies depend on
more than one application for their business process, necessitating a smooth
flow of data across them. With issues in integration, the very purpose of
employing the application is left unmet.
Therefore
before deciding on a cloud vendor, make sure you gain an in-depth understanding
about the integration process and issues, to handle them effectively even
before starting to migrate which will make the whole course smooth.
Hidden Costs Revelation
Cloud computing
helps enterprises save money on software purchases or licences. With cost
structure in the form of subscription fees, enterprises can evade huge
investments on infrastructure and pay per usage. However before migrating your
application to cloud it is essential to look at your monthly and yearly package
options along with the many aspects like number of subscriptions, services, bandwidth
limitations, one-time migration costs, integration costs, offers, and support
and exit charges. Also understand the complete pricing model for version
upgrades, increase in database, number of users, data storage, back-ups, features,
etc.
Keep an eye on your package regularly for its limitations like data
storage, bandwidth usage, back-ups, data base size, etc., which in-turn helps you
manage your charges well. Finally, look for ways to increase the ROI and
success metrics of the application.
Cloud Security: Who’s
Responsible?
Security is one of the top concerns for companies and end users leveraging
from cloud. Cloud vendors must ideally provide reliable services with security
at multiple layers—data, application, infrastructure and end user. Cloud
security issues are more complex for users who do not hold zero responsibility.
According to a recent survey conducted by Ponemon Institute on the
Security of Cloud Computing Providers, both customers and providers seldom take
the responsibilities for data security on cloud. In fact, most of the providers
believe that it is customer’s responsibility to secure their data—which is
unfair. While both the parties point out each other for data infringement, in
reality, both are equally responsible if data is hacked.
It is important that customers take necessary actions for data
security, without feeling that cloud solution will handle security concerns on
its own. Hence you can check with the vendors as to what they offer for data protection
while in addition protecting your data with secure passwords for data access
and constantly updating them.
Will Cloud Computing Lead to
Privacy Obliteration?
Cloud computing brings numerous benefits to enterprises. However most
of us hardly know what is the case behind the scene when it comes to privacy of
your data and personal information which is on cloud. The privacy of your data
majorly depends on the type of cloud that you choose.
If for example, the cloud application works on an advertising revenue
model, your personal information is bound to be grabbed. Vendors will protect
your data when you pay for using the applications like business emailing, news
portals, software applications, etc and hence choose your vendor keeping your
data security in mind.
Speed of Data Restoration—Disaster
Recovery
Cloud network goes down at any point of time; but what really matters
is how swiftly they recover from a disaster and how their infrastructure is
designed for such a downtime recovery. Very few cloud providers unveil the
metrics data of uptime and illustrate reports of their past. You can ask
providers about their past experiences on disasters, maintenance schedules and their
customer’s feedback which will all provide you with a holistic idea of their
service. Some of the leading vendors like Saleforce.com publish statistics on a
public web page.
In some cases data will be lost when cloud network is down, where it is
highly impossible to recover the lost data. Data back-up is the only best way
for data recovery which can solve data protection issues on the cloud and also help
to restore data quickly when you need it. Organizations need to check the
performance data reports of previous issues for reference. You should not only depend
on the cloud solution or providers for data restore, but it’s better to take
data back-up every time it’s been updated.
Switching Vendors on the Cloud
If you have hosted your application with one vendor and decide to
migrate to another, it is not usually easy and with cloud it’s often appalling.
Organizations should know how easy or hard it is to get the data out from their
existing cloud and move it to another cloud. In some cases this goes hand in
hand with integration and you need to be aware of data migration across the cloud solutions.
You also need to check the strengths, weaknesses, costs, security features and
performance capabilities of the other vendor. Test the performance of the new
cloud soon after everything is set and migration is in full swing.
Enabling Green Cloud Computing
As we see a massive growth in industrialization, there is a growing
need for resources to run systems or machines. Data centers enabling cloud
computing are power-hungry consuming several megawatts of power to run server
farms and air-conditioners. And according to a survey conducted by Greenpeace
report, nearly $450 billion dollars are spent on new data center facilities. This
automatically leads to a huge impact on our environment.
However, a research by Microsoft suggests, big energy reductions from
cloud helps businesses by moving on-premise business applications to cloud which
can reduce their power consumption & carbon emission by 30%. Even large
data centers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. can use piped Columbia River
water to cool down the servers. So make sure that your cloud vendor holds
Greenpeace scorecard if you are an environment friendly organization.
Along with the above mentioned critical factors, feel free to
comprehend all your queries and requirements whatsoever with the cloud vendors
before making your final decision.
