Is Your Business Ready for the Cloud?

A new buzzword emerged in the last few years and it has promised to take IT headaches away. It has assured business owners that they can save money and resources, while making their lives easier with unlimited scalability.

What is this solution?
It’s “the cloud”, but is it the right fit for your business?

What is Cloud Computing?

“A model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

There are several pros and cons to putting your data and applications out on the Internet. The fact is, the clear-cut use case for cloud computing remains elusive.

Advantages

• Simplicity
• Cost
• Scalability
• Universal Access & Collaboration
• Fewer Maintenance Issues

Disadvantages

• Requires constant (perhaps redundant Internet connection)
• Dependency on third party provider
• Performance drawbacks
• Limited Features
• Security
• Potential loss of data

To put it all in perspective, the cloud concept is quite simple. It is simply taking all of your local data and applications (or a subset of) from servers sitting on premises and migrating that data to servers at a datacenter on the Internet.

As noted above, this allows for greater scalability. In some cases, there may be limitless capacity. It is cheap to deploy, and often times very straightforward. Users can access the data from anywhere with an Internet connection.

However, an Internet connection must be robust, and may require redundancy. It simply will not work if there are Internet connectivity issues. The added cost of a redundant Internet connection should always be taken into consideration. There may also be potential performance drawbacks. I also believe the greatest con is that there is greater risk of losing data. If your cloud provider is in only one datacenter and not replicated, and they lose the data, what are you going to do?

As you can see, there are several advantages and disadvantages to cloud computing. Hopefully this short article has raised some awareness and will help you understand the sides of the debate. Ultimately, you need to be the one that answers the question: “Is my business ready for the cloud”?

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