Understanding roadblocks for enterprise Cloud adoption
A recent news article in Computerworld mentioned “As Cloud Computing Grows, Customer Frustration Mounts”. The reason for the fears mainly revolves around the concerns involving Cloud computing. Some of the key concerns of the customers range from as technical as Data transparency and Security to the intangible factors involving trust. Many business concerns like Vendor lock-in also play a very important role in determining the association of organizations with the cloud.
A survey produced by the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the IEEE professional association suggests that security aspects identified as data privacy and encryption are some of the most important concerns of Cloud users. This means that there is an absence of a compliance environment and in-turn a need to create one. Data information like the location of the data, owner of the data and the data after termination of the contract are some of the expectations of a user while adopting Cloud. Hence, it calls for openness and transparency from the Cloud provider.
Another major concern includes the fear of vendor lock-in. Availability of the Cloud provider and the ease of data migration are necessary for Cloud adoption. Hence a clear exit strategy needs to be thought of by the users in case the Cloud providers themselves go out of business. This demands an extra effort from the cloud users to refine the strategy in terms of offering to the end customers. This extra effort may lead cloud users to think twice about exploiting the humongous benefits offered by the Cloud. The problem of vendor lock-in can be solved if there are common data formats, APIs and protocols in place so that the application running on one Cloud provider is easily ported to another.
In choosing a Cloud provider trust plays an important role. I came across an analogy which compared the use of Cloud to the use of bank. One trusts the bank and deposits the money in it because one is sure that the money is safe there. Similar trust is needed to place the business on Cloud, which means there is a need for a “concern-free” Cloud computing environment. If we consider the bank, there are a lot of regulatory bodies which control the standards and regulations and hence the user is sure that even if something goes wrong, the bank is liable for it and an appropriate compensation will be provided if an adverse situation arises. Similar standards and regulations shall ease and accelerate Cloud adoption. The security concerns call for open Cloud standards. Thanks to CSA, a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing has been successfully initiated.
Apart from implementation of the existing standards, a thorough analysis to fill the gap identified in the existing framework will surely contribute towards addressing the major concerns of the cloud adoption. Though these concerns still haunt the market while deciding over the adoption of Cloud computing, the key drivers including cost effectiveness, lesser time to market and optimized scalability remain the benefits of Cloud computing. A proper ROI calculation by considering the intangible parameters plays a key role in the decision making for adopting Cloud as an integral part of the IT infrastructure.
Jayapriya.K
April 30th, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Good read. As you rightly mentioned, addressing such concerns would greatly help alleviate the initial fears of Cloud adoption by the masses.