Cloud Computing Challenges

Cloud Computing Challenges

Despite its growing influence, concerns regarding cloud computing still remain. In our opinion, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and the model is worth exploring. Some common challenges are:

Cloud Computing Challenges

1.Data Protection:

Data Security is a crucial element that warrants scrutiny. Enterprises are reluctant to buy an assurance of business data security from vendors. They fear losing data to competition and the data confidentiality of consumers. In many instances, the actual storage location is not disclosed, adding onto the security concerns of enterprises. In the existing models, firewalls across data centers (owned by enterprises) protect this sensitive information. In the cloud model, Service providers are responsible for maintaining data security and enterprises would have to rely on them.

2.Data Recovery and Availability:

All business applications have Service level agreements that are stringently followed. Operational teams play a key role in management of service level agreements and runtime governance of applications. In production environments, operational teams support

• Appropriate clustering and Fail over Data Replication
• System monitoring (Transactions monitoring, logs monitoring and others)
• Maintenance (Runtime Governance)
• Disaster recovery
• Capacity and performance management

If, any of the above mentioned services is under-served by a cloud provider, the damage & impact could be severe.

Cloud Computing Challenges

3. Management Capabilities:

Despite there being multiple cloud providers, the management of platform and infrastructure is still in its infancy. Features like „Auto-scaling‟ for example, are a crucial requirement for many enterprises. There is huge potential to improve on the scalability and load balancing features provided today.

4.Regulatory and Compliance Restrictions:

In some of the European countries, Government regulations do not allow customer's personal information and other sensitive information to be physically located outside the state or country. In order to meet such requirements, cloud providers need to setup a data center or a storage site exclusively within the country to comply with regulations. Having such an infrastructure may not always be feasible and is a big challenge for cloud providers.

With cloud computing, the action moves to the interface — that is, to the interface between service suppliers and multiple groups of service consumers. Cloud services will demand expertise in distributed services, procurement, risk assessment and service negotiation — areas that many enterprises are only modestly equipped to handle.