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Cloud computing era is here and it has changed the way businesses have been operative for a long time. Enablement of cloud resources access over the Internet made it possible for enterprises to be more agile, scalable, and cost effective as compared to traditional hosting used to happen in-house in their own data centers. Moving IT landscape to cloud for accelerating business has its own set of benefits along with challenges it brings related to security, access management, ownership, increased risks of cyber attacks etc.
In today’s topic we will learn about how organizations can benefit from cloud computing and what are the challenges of cloud computing technology domain, how to make an informed choice about cloud providers?
Introduction to Cloud Computing
Hundreds of enterprises are leveraging cloud computing services. Small and medium size businesses use cloud for their business to enable a nimble startup to compete with the capacity of established players. In the upcoming section we will look at some benefits and challenges organizations are facing with cloud technology adoption.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Reduction in Total Cost of Ownership – The most widely called out advantage of cloud computing is outsourcing of traditional inhouse data centers to get reduction in costs for hardware, processing, storage, networking, bandwidth and software licenses. The major difference with major cloud service providers such as Amazon, Azure and Google are they are available for any size of business and are pay as per use.
- Increased Reliability and Scalability – The hosting provider’s massive infrastructure enables reliability for hosted applications. Brings in additional benefits of backups, reduced latency, fault tolerance, and ability to support peak demand hours.
- Increased Test Automation – continuous build and test is considered the ideal methodology during these times where application time to market is very critical. One of the limitations of more widespread adoption is availability of sufficient number of build servers, insufficient servers to test performance etc. with virtualization combined in cloud infrastructure that can be handled more quickly, efficiently and at much less cost.
- Enablement of Collaborative Applications – virtual business partnerships for short term are key for utilizing rapidly emerging business technologies and opportunities. Cloud services enable partners to leverage each other’s CRM as well as access and emerging market applications.
- Application Development Agility – Team agility is increased in application development with cloud services and databases providing increased flexibility for application teams to focus on end to end execution. Cloud databases provide seamless access and loose coupling for greater agility.
- End User Computing – The need for tailored solutions to meet the needs of end users and cost of custom development puts for whether user communities can support their own needs using some form of end user computing such as use of JavaScript for Web and REST services and cloud API pattern of choice.
Challenges of Cloud Computing
- Service Level Agreements – The larger the business risk, the more important it is that suppliers and providers understand what level of services they can rely on. It is true for cloud computing similar the way it was considered a concern in traditional data center approach, there is no difference practically!
- National Data Protection – The large data centers spread across geos provide large sources of Internet bandwidth and computing capabilities. However, this is an area of concern when it comes to hosting national data outside the boundaries. This led to legislation restricting retention and in certain cases flow of information outside national boundaries.
- Application Security – application security beyond authorization is application responsibility and has always been an area which calls for application developers’ dependency for support. Client-side security is improving but remains a challenge due to the state of browsers and applications need to ensure that critical security is outside the scope of the browser. All data should be encrypted at rest and over wire.
- Loosely Coupled Service Design – it is a challenge to design services which applications can be loosely coupled. More education, training and examples of good and consistent service design is the need which developers need to understand.
- Integration with Legacy Systems – businesses having legacy systems which may face challenges while integrating with cloud-based applications. This calls for careful planning and implementation to ensure seamless integration of legacy systems to the cloud.