Pros and Cons to cloud computing

June 26, 2018

When determining whether cloud computing is the right solution for your company’s analytic environment, there are both challenges and benefits to consider.

Let us look at the challenges first.

IT governance and control

IT departments are still quite skeptical of letting go of their data. There are many reasons for this, although a fear of losing their jobs and the concerns about security and privacy over data put it at the top of the list.

IT typically is in charge of implementing structure for storing corporate data assets, and making sure the data is used according to the agreed-upon corporate policies and procedures.

In order to maintain an effective cooperation between a company’s IT department and a cloud provider, it is essential to have a clear service agreement in place, where acceptable standards, policies and procedures are clearly defined, and these standards are upheld within the company.

It is important for the IT personnel to have a thorough understanding of how the data is obtained, stored, and accessed by the organization’s personnel. Finally, it is recommended that IT departments together with commercial departments’ leaders analyze and determine whether these cloud-deployed assets support your organization’s strategy and business goals.

Managing multiple cloud deployments

Quite often, companies decide to have more than one cloud computing implementation; they may use a combination of both private and public deployments, and maybe even multiple ones for various types of workload. The first thing that needs to be checked upon and ascertained is the cloud service provider(s)’s compliance with the company’s regulatory requirements.

The company must determine if each cloud provider complies with its regulatory requirements. In addition, when making a decision on your cloud provider(s), asses the mechanisms and tools in place for detecting and preventing security breaches. In case the risk to data security is high, it may be feasible for the corporation to keep highly sensitive data (such as customers’ personal data records, medical health records, etc.) within the organization’s in-house IT premises rather than deploying them to cloud computing.

Performance

It is clear that if your provider’s service is down, so are you. All you can do is wait for the provider to come back up. A second concern is your internet bandwidth. A slow internet means slow connectivity.

Changes to IT workflows

Compliance and security become more complex matters to deal with in hybrid environments (those that combine on-premises data center and cloud deployments).

An organization may consider hiring advanced analysts and data scientists to integrate data that is on-premises with data in various cloud-computing sites. Without proper data archive system in place, keeping track of the data location can become an uneasy task.

Controlling your costs

The on-demand and scalable nature of cloud computing services can make it hard to estimate and figure out exactly all the associated costs. Different cloud computing companies have different cost plans. Some charge by the number of active users, volume of data stored, while others do by cluster size. Some have a mixture of all three. Make sure to pay attention to hidden costs such as database changes, requested customizations, etc.

Now we will look at some obvious benefits of migrating to a cloud-computing environment:

Ease of implementation

For most companies, purchasing a cloud computing environment is as easy as swiping your credit card. It takes only minutes to access the environment because the technological infrastructure is all ready to go. This must be differentiated from the data infrastructure that must also be established. Whether you implement a data lake, a data vault, or a data warehouse, design and development work must be performed in addition to the technological set up.

No maintenance or upgrade headaches

These are again not your concern but the cloud-computing provider’s. Not having to manage the infrastructure, frees up more resources to spend on obtaining, accessing, and using the data.

Elastic scalability

Many customers say this is the most appealing trait of cloud computing. Based on a company’s workload needs, it can easily scale up and down. There is no need to buy extra computing capacity “just in case” a company may need it later. Cloud data warehouses can increase or decrease storage, users, clusters with very minor or no disruption to the overall environment.

Decreased operating costs

There is a significant difference between capital expenditures and operating expenses. Basically, you are “renting” the infrastructure rather than incurring upfront expenditures on building your own environment. The cloud computing provider bears all the system and equipment costs, the costs of upgrades, new hardware and software, as well as the personnel and energy costs.

Staying on track with Innovation from new cloud companies

Cloud technologies have derived from very innovative new companies. They make full use of all the advantages that the cloud has to offer. These technology companies can also add new features, functions, and capabilities, making them available to all customers immediately.

Ability to deal with the vast diversity of data available for analytics

Cloud computing providers can handle well-with structured data (data from operational systems) as well as the unstructured data, such as social media, IoT, etc. Cloud implementations can support both fixed schemes and dynamic ones, making it an accomplished tool for routine production analytics such as Key Performance Indicators or financial analyses, as well as experimental, random or exploratory analyses used by data scientists.