Challenge Faced by Cloud Computing

Challenges Faced by Cloud Computing

Everywhere you turn these days “the cloud” is being talked about. This ambiguous term seems to encompass almost everything about us. While “the cloud” is just a metaphor for the internet, cloud computing is what people are really talking about these days. It provides better data storage, data security, flexibility, increased collaboration between employees, and changes the workflow of small businesses and large enterprises to help them make better decisions while decreasing costs.

It is clear that utilizing the cloud is a trend that continues to grow. We have already predicted in our business intelligence trends article the importance and implementation of the cloud in companies like Alibaba, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

The significance of the cloud is increasing exponentially. Gartner forecasts that the cloud services market will grow 17.3% in 2019 ($206.2 billion) and by 2022, 90% of organizations will be using cloud services.

What Are The Challenges Of Cloud Computing?

In January 2018, RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey on the latest cloud trends. They questioned 997 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud infrastructure. Their findings were insightful, especially in regards to current cloud computing challenges. To answer the main question of what are the challenges for cloud computing, below we have expanded upon some of their findings and provided additional cloud computing problems that businesses may need to address.

1. Security issues

Security risks of cloud computing have become the top concern in 2018 as 77% of respondents stated in the referred survey. For the longest time, the lack of resources/expertise was the number one voiced cloud challenge. In 2018 however, security inched ahead.

Security has indeed been a primary, and valid, concern from the start of cloud computing technology: you are unable to see the exact location where your data is stored or being processed. This increases the cloud computing risks that can arise during the implementation or management of the cloud. Headlines highlighting data breaches, compromised credentials, and broken authentication, hacked interfaces and APIs, account hijacking haven’t helped alleviate concerns. All of this makes trusting sensitive and proprietary data to a third party hard to stomach for some and, indeed, highlighting the challenges of cloud computing. Luckily as cloud providers and users, mature security capabilities are constantly improving. To ensure your organization’s privacy and security is intact, verify the SaaS provider has secure user identity management, authentication, and access control mechanisms in place. Also, check which database privacy and security laws they are subject to.

While you are auditing a provider’s security and privacy laws, make sure to also confirm the third biggest issue is taken care of: compliance. Your organization needs to be able to comply with regulations and standards, no matter where your data is stored. Speaking of storage, also ensure the provider has strict data recovery policies in place.

The security risks of cloud computing have become a reality for every organization, be it small or large. That’s why it is important to implement a secure BI cloud tool that can leverage proper security measures.

2. Cost management and containment

The next part of our cloud computing risks list involves costs. For the most part cloud computing can save businesses money. In the cloud, an organization can easily ramp up its processing capabilities without making large investments in new hardware. Businesses can instead access extra processing through pay-as-you-go models from public cloud providers. However, the on-demand and scalable nature of cloud computing services make it sometimes difficult to define and predict quantities and costs.

Luckily there are several ways to keep cloud costs in check, for example, optimizing costs by conducting better financial analytics and reporting, automating policies for governance, or keeping the management reporting practice on course, so that these issues in cloud computing could be decreased.

3. Lack of resources/expertise

One of the cloud challenges companies and enterprises are facing today is lack of resources and/or expertise. Organizations are increasingly placing more workloads in the cloud while cloud technologies continue to rapidly advance. Due to these factors, organizations are having a tough time keeping up with the tools. Also, the need for expertise continues to grow. These challenges can be minimized through additional training of IT and development staff. A strong CIO championing cloud adoption also helps.

SME (small and medium-sized) organizations may find adding cloud specialists to their IT teams to be prohibitively costly. Luckily, many common tasks performed by these specialists can be automated. To this end companies are turning to DevOps tools, like Chef and Puppet, to perform tasks like monitoring usage patterns of resources and automated backups at predefined time periods. These tools also help optimize the cloud for cost, governance, and security.

4. Governance/Control

There are many challenges cloud computing facing in terms of governance/control. Proper IT governance should ensure IT assets are implemented and used according to agreed-upon policies and procedures; ensure that these assets are properly controlled and maintained, and ensure that these assets are supporting your organization’s strategy and business goals.

In today’s cloud-based world, IT does not always have full control over the provisioning, de-provisioning, and operations of infrastructure. This has increased the difficulty for IT to provide the governance, compliance, risks and data quality management required. To mitigate the various risks and uncertainties in transitioning to the cloud, IT must adapt its traditional IT governance and control processes to include the cloud. To this effect, the role of central IT teams in the cloud has been evolving over the last few years. Along with business units, central IT is increasingly playing a role in selecting, brokering, and governing cloud services. On top of this third-party cloud computing/management providers are progressively providing governance support and best practices.

5. Compliance

One of the risks of cloud computing is facing today is compliance. That is an issue for anyone using backup services or cloud storage. Every time a company moves data from the internal storage to a cloud, it is faced with being compliant with industry regulations and laws. For example, healthcare organizations in the USA have to comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996).

Depending on the industry and requirements, every organization must ensure these standards are respected and carried out.

This is one of the many challenges facing cloud computing, and although the procedure can take a certain amount of time, the data must be properly stored.

Cloud customers need to look for vendors that can provide compliance and check if they are regulated by the standards they need. Some vendors offer certified compliance, but in some cases, additional input is needed on both sides to ensure proper compliance regulations.

6. Managing multiple clouds

Challenges facing cloud computing haven’t just been concentrated in one, single cloud. The state of multi-cloud has grown exponentially in recent years. Companies are shifting or combining public and private clouds and, as mentioned earlier, tech giants like Alibaba and Amazon are leading the way.

In the referred survey, 81 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. Enterprises with a hybrid strategy (combining public and private clouds) fell from 58 percent in 2017 to 51 percent in 2018, while organizations with a strategy of multiple public clouds or multiple private clouds grew slightly.

In the cloud strategy, 81% of of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. While organizations leverage an average of almost 5 clouds, it is evident that the use of the cloud will continue to grow. That’s why it is important to answer the main questions organizations are facing today: what are the challenges for cloud computing and how to overcome them?

To summarize, here are the top challenges in cloud computing:

Security issues

Cost management and containment

Lack of resources/expertise

Governance/Control

Compliance

Managing multiple clouds

Performance

Building a private cloud

Segmented usage and adoption

Migration

Authors - Ayush Patidar Bhagwat Borole Nikita Borole