Is your company eyeing cloud computing as a potential way to save money and resources? If so, then you may be interested in the results of a recent survey from research firm IDC (News - Alert) on the pros and cons of cloud-based services.

 

Surveying a panel of IT executives, IDC found that the perceived cost savings of cloud computing was the driving force behind their adoption. IT execs cited three core benefits, including the ability to pay for just what you need, the option to pay as you go, and the potential to shift IT headcount and expenses to the cloud-service provider.

 

Beyond cost savings, companies also lauded cloud services as easy and fast to deploy. In fact, their quick deployment and the ability to pay as you go both essentially tied for first place as the top selling points of cloud computing. This compares with last year’s IDC survey when deployment was by far the number one benefit. But with the recession impacting IT budgets, saving money has clearly become more of a key priority. Still, IT execs might not be quite so fond of cloud computing were its deployment not seen as relatively user-friendly.

 

Another major benefit of cloud computing cited in the survey is the use of standardized systems and applications. IT groups and data centers that run everything in-house are often forced to support a myriad of different and often redundant systems and applications.

 

In a prior column, I mentioned how my former company once embarked on a project to standardize and reduce the number of applications we had to support for our users. We found heavy duplication and redundancy, but since there was no such thing as cloud computing at the time, we tackled this project internally, a fairly time-consuming task.

 

Because cloud-service providers often run shared servers, systems, and applications, by nature they can offer the type of standardization that companies can’t easily achieve internally. Such standardization could help IT more easily adapt and respond to the changing needs of the business, believes IDC. As a result, IT execs can use this benefit as justification to migrate some of their internal services and apps to the cloud.

 

Okay, so those are some of the pros of cloud computing. What about the cons?

 

 The top negatives, or challenges, mentioned by IT in the survey include security, availability and performance, with security the number one concern.

 

Security is always heavily on the minds of everyone in IT. Keeping your organization safe is paramount, a task that any good IT pro regards seriously. The obvious fear with cloud computing is that security is taken out of your hands. You’re dependent on an external organization, trusting that they’ll keep their systems and your data protected and updated with the right security software.

 

Personally, I think the right cloud-service provider can sometimes offer better security than many businesses can internally. Because such providers run shared systems and applications, they can often more reliably and quickly tighten their security, keep it updated, and respond to threats. But as cybercriminals become shrewder and more sophisticated, security becomes more demanding. And if you’re not confident that your cloud company can keep up with the demand, this certainly becomes a key concern.

 

Availability and performance both tied for second place as a major negative for cloud computing. IDC wrapped both challenges under the label of dependablity. I think this is clearly a valid concern as we’ve seen several incidents in recent years of cloud-service providers temporarily going down or losing customer data. IDC sees this as a clear call to action for providers to offer service level agreements, or service level assurances, to try to assuage this fear. As more business customers hop onto the cloud computing bandwagon, they’re likely to insist that their providers better guarantee reliability through SLAs.

 

Ironically, another negative that showed up in the survey was cost. Though this factor was considered a positive by many IT execs, some felt cloud services could actually run up more money than if services were kept in-house. The concern here: what if users gobble up more storage or other resources from the cloud than IT has budgeted for? This open-ended model may drive corporate customers to ask cloud-service providers to better help them anticipate and monitor their needs so as not to drive up costs unexpectedly.

 

Another challenge is the lack of interoperability standards. Standardization on applications and systems was mentioned as a plus. But still, IT exes surveyed wondered if cloud services might lock them into inflexible standards, limiting their ability to grow and upgrade.

 

Two related concerns mentioned were the difficulty in bringing applications and systems back in-house and the challenge in integrating cloud-based services with in-house resources. Bridging this gap between the cloud and internal IT will be a key requirement for providers anxious to drum up more business, believes IDC.

 

Finally, the survey indicated that more execs identified the cons of cloud computing over the pros, leading IDC to stress that the cloud still faces some hurdles in gaining widescale adoption and acceptance among IT.

 

Whatever the pros and cons, there’s no question that cloud computing is here to stay. If your company is looking shift some of its IT resources to the cloud, I think the results of this survey give you a sense of the good and bad, helpful in making sure you choose the right provider.

community comments powered by Disqus