In the decision of whether or not to use cloud technology, a business should consider the pros and cons. Which all depend on whether your current business model is largely suited for the cloud. IT costs are increasing year after year and cloud computing is becoming the next logical step. Just the mention of cloud computing has senior management salivating at the thought of saving money and time in moving to the cloud.
For those who are unfamiliar, cloud computing is simply the delivery of computing and storage as a service which accessed through your web browser.
Cloud computing existed back in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The PC was mainly giant mainframes and users accessed them via a display monitor. Forty years later, we call it cloud computing and the display monitor is your web browser.
The death of cloud computing or mainframes happened in the 1980-90’s when Bill Gates reinvented the Server and PC with Windows NT and Windows 95, respectively. A PC in everyone’s home become their motto. Today, costs of servers and maintenance are sky rocketing. Let’s explore the pros and cons of moving to the cloud.
Pros of Cloud Computing
IT costs are skyrocketing. When deciding if the Cloud is right for you, one of the biggest Pro for moving to the cloud is cost. For example, maintaining your IT in house costs money in the following: servers, OS licensing, software maintenance support, server maintenance, IT salaries and cooling and electricity costs associated with your server space. This can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. By moving all of your systems to the cloud and paying a set price per month, you eliminate a lot of these costs. The question you have to ask yourself is how much control do I want or need and how much can I let go.
Do you want to own your server equipment or rent it? If you own your equipment you need a place to store it and maintain it just as if you were owning a car. Servers require maintenance and must be upgraded continuously for security. Renting your equipment in the cloud allows you to budget better as you know what your costs will be from month to month.
Scalability and elasticity is yet another pro in moving to the cloud. For example, if you own equipment and need to scale or grow on demand, it becomes very difficult to get equipment provisioned quickly. If you are running in the cloud, it becomes very easy to scale and grow based on demand. For example, if you own an online business and you typically run on 5 web servers to do business, the cloud can benefit you. During the Christmas holidays, business usually doubles, if not triples. If you were running in the cloud, once demand is detected, new web servers are spun up automatically and configured to run. When the demand lapses, the machine(s) deprecate themselves. All of this happens with no additional cost to you except the uptime of the additional servers.
Cons of Cloud Computing
Now we will talk about some of the cons of moving to a cloud solution. Security is on everyone’s mind with all the breaches taking place. In recent news, social networking site LinkedIn was hacked and roughly 6.5 million passwords were taken which caused LinkedIn to force password changes across the board. If security is really important to you, make sure you do your diligence on your cloud provider and ask the tough questions about their encryption and how they promise to protect your data.
Reliability is another con. Do you have a dedicated Internet connection? If not, if your Internet goes down, your business goes down. You want to make sure that you have 99.99 % uptime on your Internet connection if you move to the cloud. An outage can be detrimental.
Your cloud solution will only be as good as the people who are managing it. It is important to interview the staff responsible for maintaining your servers in the cloud. Oftentimes a language barrier or lack of knowledge on the part of those responsible for maintaining your server can be detrimental to the success of your cloud solution or implementation.
While there are positives and negatives in moving to the cloud, it is still a great solution if it works for your business model. Perform due diligence and you will determine what type of cloud solution is right for you.
