Enterprises must weigh the advantages and drawbacks of public cloud adoption in order to determine whether it's the right fit.
Benefits
The cloud has many advantages over on-premises IT:
- Access to new technologies. Organizations that use large cloud providers get early and instant access to the IT industry's latest technologies, ranging from automatically updated applications to machine learning and AI. Many cloud customers lack the resources to obtain such access on their own.
- Virtually unlimited scalability. Cloud capacity and resources rapidly expand to meet user demands and traffic spikes. Public cloud users also achieve greater redundancy and high availability due to the providers' various, logically separated cloud locations. In addition to redundancy and availability, public cloud users receive faster connectivity between cloud services and end-users via their provider's network interfaces -- though bandwidth and latency issues are still common.
- Flexibility. The flexible and scalable nature of public cloud storage enables users to store high volumes of data and access them easily. Many organizations rely on the cloud for disaster recovery, to back up data and applications in case of emergency or outage. It's tempting to store all data indefinitely, but users should set up a data retention policy that regularly deletes old data from storage to avoid long-term storage costs and to maintain privacy.
- Analytics. Organizations should gather useful metrics on the data they store and resources they use. Doing so presents another benefit -- cloud data analytics. Public cloud services can perform analytics on high volumes and accommodate a variety of data types to present business insights.
Other public cloud benefits include access to the provider's reliable infrastructure and the abstraction of overhead management tasks. These enable IT staff to focus on tasks that are more important to the business, such as writing code for applications.
Challenges
While the public cloud presents many advantages, organizations also face a range of challenges and must separate cloud computing myths from realities:
- Runaway costs. Increasingly complex cloud costs and pricing models make it difficult for organizations to keep track of IT spending. The cloud is often cheaper than on-premises options, but organizations sometimes end up paying more for cloud. Pricey data egress fees make staying on a cloud budget even more challenging.
- Scarce cloud expertise. Another challenge is the skills gap among IT professionals in the cloud computing industry. Companies struggle to hire and retain staff with expertise in building and managing modern cloud applications. Without this expertise, organizations are ill-equipped to handle the complexities of modern IT demands. IT professionals that hope to fill these roles can better prepare for career opportunities by fine-tuning their cloud skills in areas such as architecture, operations and coding.
- Limited controls. Public cloud users also face the tradeoff of limited control over their IT stack since the provider can decide when and how to manage configurations. Other public cloud challenges include data separation problems due to multi-tenancy, latency issues for remote end-users and adherence to industry- and country-specific regulations.
Cloud management tools and strategies can help organizations address some of these public cloud challenges and optimize their use of cloud resources and costs. As a start, even a general understanding of cloud basics is helpful.
