Top Six Cloud Computing Challenges

6 Cloud Computing Challenges Businesses Are Facing In These Days

 

1. Lack of resources/expertise

For the longest time, security was the number one voiced cloud challenge. In 2016 however, lack of resources/expertise inched ahead. Organizations are increasingly placing  more workloads in the cloud while cloud technologies continue to rapidly advance. Due to these factors organizations are having a hard 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. As Cloud Engineer Drew Firment puts it:

“The success of cloud adoption and migrations comes down to your people — and the investments you make in a talent transformation program. Until you focus on the #1 bottleneck to the flow of cloud adoption, improvements made anywhere else are an illusion.”

SME 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.

2. Security issues

Resource/expertise concerns slightly passed security cloud computing problems in 2016. We already mentioned the hot debate around data security in our BI trends for 2017, and 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. 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. 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 data security and privacy 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.

3. Cost management and containment

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 makes it some times difficult to define and project quantities and costs. Luckily there are several ways to keep cloud costs in check including.

4. 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 and risk 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 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. Performance

When a business moves to the cloud it becomes dependent on the service providers. This partnership often provides businesses with innovative technologies they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. On the other hand the performance of the organization’s BI and other cloud based systems is also tied to the performance of the cloud provider when it falters. When your provider is down, you are also down.

This isn’t uncommon, over the past couple of years all the big cloud players have experienced outages. Make sure your provider has the right processes in place and that they will alert you if there is ever an issue.

For the data driven organization real time data is imperative. With an inherent lack of control that comes with cloud computing, companies may run into real time monitoring issues. Make sure your SaaS provider has real time monitoring policies in place to help mitigate these issues.

6. Segmented usage and adoption

Most organizations did not have a robust cloud adoption strategy in place when they started to move to the cloud.  Instead, ad-hoc strategies sprouted, fueled by several components. One of them was the speed of cloud adoption. Another one was the staggered expiration of data centre contracts/equipment, which led to intermittent cloud migration. Finally, there also were individual development teams using public cloud for specific applications or projects. These bootstrap environments have fostered full integration and maturation issues including:

• Isolated cloud projects lacking shared standards
• Ad hoc security configurations
• Lack of cross-team shared resources and learnings

In fact, a recent survey by IDC of 6,159 executives found that just 3% of respondents define their cloud strategies as “optimised”.  Luckily, centralized IT, strong governance and control policies, and some heavy lifting can get usage, adoption, and cloud computing strategies inline.

In the End the Cloud Still Wins

It is no secret, cloud computing is revolutionizing the IT industry. It is also shaking up the business intelligence (BI) landscape, and well, pretty everything else it touches. As the cloud adoption exponentially grows, businesses of all sizes are realizing the benefits. For startups and small to medium sized businesses (SMEs), that can’t afford costly server maintenance, but also may have to scale overnight, the benefits are especially great.

While cloud computing challenges do exist, if properly addressed these 6 issues don’t mean your IT roadmap has to remain anchored on-premise. Business intelligence (BI) and cloud computing are an ideal match, as the first one provides the right information to the right people while the latter is an agile way to access BI applications. To make the best out of it, you should take a strategic iterative approach to implementation, explore hybrid cloud solutions, involve business and IT teams, invest in a CIO, and choose the right BI SaaS partner. All this will ensure that the benefits of cloud business intelligence will far outway the challenges.