Bandwagon of Cloud Computing

Similar to the platform wars of the eighties (followed by browser wars of nineties); Cloud Computing is currently going through a war with each player trying to establish itself as the destination. The concept of the cloud is amorphous at the moment, but it is basically a flexible hosting model in which applications and storage flow freely to meet performance requirements while optimizing on cost.

Top 10 issues that go against Cloud Computing initiatives especially in larger enterprises are:

1. Currently Cloud Computing is tied to the Provider (Amazon, Google, Azure, etc.).
Open standards, flexibility, interoperability – that make cloud computing a viable and attractive opportunity for businesses. Without these, your business could simply be locking away its assets in a private, inflexible cloud from which you could find it hard to extricate yourself.

2. Migration of Existing Applications / Deployments to the Cloud: Most enterprises have legacy application that were not build with the concept of Cloud computing and may need to be retrofit to allow Cloud Computing benefits, this will always been a point against migrating to the cloud.

3. Vertical scaling is difficult. Vertical scalability is the ability of an application to scale under load; to maintain performance levels as the number of concurrent requests increases. While load balancing solutions can certainly assist in optimizing the environment in which an application needs to scale by reducing overhead that can negatively impact performance (such as TCP session management, SSL operations, and compression/caching functionality) it can't solve core problems that prevent vertical scalability. Cloud computing can certainly address vertical scalability limitations by using horizontal scaling techniques to ensure capacity meets demand and performance level agreements are met. But doing so may cost you dearly and eliminate many of the financial incentives that led you to adopt cloud computing in the first place.

4. Disk performance tends to be low. Since, for each virtual instance, the storage is carved from a big storage box, the data is travelling over wires. Not having a local disk can be major drawback for IO intensive application.

5. For something like Google App Engine, there is a fear of lock-in. You create application specifically for that environment which raises the exit barrier.

6. Maturity of the Cloud Space/Platform – with so many startups providing ‘Cloud Infrastructure’, Enterprises are wary of Cloud Computing providers changing their Business Models midway or even going out of business.

7. Licensing and Portability of Licenses – The Open Source on Cloud is great and is probably the most dominant of models that exist today however that might not be true for a lot of enterprise class customers. This could be a potential headache that IT Departments don’t know how to deal with in a cloud scenario.

8. Cloud computing promotes better resource utilization, but the gains are greatest when moving from relatively small consumption of resources upwards. If you're a very large enterprise, you might find you can achieve better economy by doing your own cloud than going to an outsourced one.

9. Industries that deal with sensitive data will be worried about security when it comes to cloud computing. The fact that the server is located in a remote area means that you have to delegate the security arrangements to someone else. Now imagine that you work in a passport office and you have to locate your service in a foreign country. Suppose war breaks out between the two countries?

10. The main problems with cloud computing are related to the loss of control to another party. This can lead to supervision problems and conflict within the information technology departments. You will have to set up new systems for dealing with this conflict and you will have to configure your communication systems on the basis that there is another company involved in your business. Sometimes cloud computing will have so many teething problems that it might take years before you settle into an agreement with your supplier whereby conflicts can be resolved before they escalate.