Migration
The truth is that you can’t just move to the cloud without clearly defining the architecture of your business, you need to make sure that the processes, applications and data are largely independent. In other words you need SOA.
Ever since I came across the concept of Cloud Computing I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between SaaS and SOA. Both give flexibility and agility to your business, the innovation that the cloud brings is the fact that the services are hosted and not proprietary. If you want to have a cost-effective cloud then you cannot ignore the need of a SOA oriented business analysis.
Security
You don’t own the hardware; you don’t have control over your data. Companies from the USA and UK answered the question: Why do you want to keep a copy of your SaaS data?
Andy Ben-Dyke, CTO at RainStor said: “UK companies clearly have a degree of apprehension towards SaaS applications and cloud computing. That’s quite surprising given the pressure on IT budgets, but it is incumbent on the IT industry to address these security and liability concerns. The concept of SaaS data escrow and providing companies with a facility to keep copies of their SaaS data will go a long way to minimizing these concerns and speed up cloud adoption.”
How will a cloud computing customer address situations where one country’s reporting or discovery obligations conflict with the data privacy laws of another county? How will a cloud computing customer protect its intellectual property rights against infringement or other wrongful activity when its cloud-based applications are hosted in a country that does not recognize certain intellectual property protection measures?
Access and control
Big companies with hundreds of servers are more reliable than your little external hard drive, right? Well yes, but servers go down and internet connections can fail. So what happens if your whole business relies on that precise data that due to technical problems can’t be accessed? It’s always safer to have a back-up at hand so in case something does happen, you have a safety net to fall on.
Offline technologies like Google Gears with decent export functionality and a good backup system can alleviate this particular concern, but not all systems offer those things. It's about understanding the risks and mitigating them.
One other problem is integrating proprietary systems with the cloud. You can’t just throw away the previous investments in IT and infrastructure and software so you have to make sure that you have a meeting point for the current solutions and the data that the cloud will administer. This requires the points of integration to be well defined.
In conclusion, although Cloud Computing offers a lot in terms of flexibility and cost-control there are some issues that you have to address when choosing this type of solution. This being said, if you do your homework it might just be everything the sales pitch promises.
You can find below my sources of inspiration for this article:
http://www.backup-technology.com/cloud-adoption-in-us-and-europe-compared/
http://www.ahmadism.com/2009/10/cloud-computing-definition-pros-cons.html
