Increasingly, organisations are being asked to adopt cloud computing solutions to support parts of their operation. However, are there circumstances when the cloud is not a good idea?

 

Cloud computing has been around for well over a decade, and since our inception, we at ICT Pulse, have written several articles on the topic. Those of us who have web-based accounts, such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, to name a few, which would be most of us, are already using a cloud-based service, and really would not know what we would do without them.

Across the Caribbean region, several data centres have been established, which offer a variety of services, including some cloud-based solution. Many of the centres owned by the major telecoms companies (Digicel and Flow), and so can be used by their business customers. However, there still appear to be some hesitancy by Caribbean organisations, in particular, to consider cloud computing to support their operational needs.

Cloud computing: a quick primer

Although we have explained it in our earlier articles, cloud computing works in the same way as your web-based email account. An application is located and runs on servers owned and operated by third parties, but you (as a user) log into it over the Internet to use the application.

Currently, the technology is sufficiently developed so that a variety of services can be provided remotely (in the cloud), including but not limited to:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – which provides computing infrastructure, such as that available from Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, and Rackspace
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – which provides computing platforms, such as operating systems, programming language execution environments and web servers., and is available from AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Salesforce, Google App Engine, to name a few
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – which provides on-demand access to application software. Examples include Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and FreshBooks
  • Cloud storage – such as Google Docs, Dropbox and Amazon E3C
  • Cloud-based database services – such as Oracle Database, Microsoft Azure SQL Server and Cloud SQL by Google
  • Cloud-based security services – which is offered by providers such as OPĀQ Networks and CloudFlare.

As a result, cloud computing offers a number of distinct benefits, such as:

  • Provided you have an internet connection, you can access your data any time, and from anywhere
  • You only pay for the services or capacity you need
  • The services and capacity you need can be scaled up and down to satisfy your requirements
  • You no longer need to purchase, configure and maintain all of the hardware required to provide yourself, your team or your organisation with the specific services or capability you need
  • You no longer need to purchase, install, configure and maintain all of the software and software licences required to support the capability and functionality you, your team or your organisation, need
  • You no longer need to maintain expensive IT support in-house, and you can reduce the high cost associated with in-house server, networking and data storage acquisition and maintenance.

Further, with the existence of public clouds, private clouds and hybrids of the two, which can address a broad range of privacy, security and management concerns that business customers tend to have, there is likely to be solutions to satisfy a variety of needs.

Although cloud computing might be great, are the reasons when it should be used?

Increasingly, many organisations – both in public and private sectors – are adopting cloud-based solutions to help them optimise their operations, whilst securing best-in-class services at price points they are prepared to pay. However, although the experts are all encouraging cloud adoption, there are circumstances, which when carefully considered, may result in cloud computing not being pursued. The following situations readily come to mind:

1.  For confidential or sensitive material, that must be tightly controlled, frequently there are concerns about such data being stored and accessed remotely.

2.  Jurisdiction and privacy concerns are additional factors that make certain organisations, and especially government, reluctant to consider cloud-based solutions for example. Depending on the country in which data is being stored, privacy laws may not fully protect the individual or organisations, For example in the United States (US), there are a variety of ways the US government can lawfully gain access to your information and use as it sees fit. If your confidential or commercially sensitive information that stored in the cloud can be readily accessed (or lawfully intercepted), this could give you cause for pause.

3.  Further if your Internet connection is slow or not reliable to facilitate access to cloud at any time and from anywhere when a cloud service is needed, cloud computing might not be the best fit for you and those circumstances.

4.  Finally, in the current environment, hacking of networks have become so rampant that concerns with respect to the safety and privacy of important data stored remotely is legitimate. Further, no network that is connected to the Internet is immune from being breached. However, if your organization prefers to have more direct (in-house) control of the information, or does not need that information to be accessed remotely, use cloud-based solutions might not be necessary.

 

Image credit:  rawpixel.com (Pexels)

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