Guest Post
Cloud computing will continue to grow in 2022. Gartner predicts that global end-user spend on the cloud will grow by 20% in 2022 to reach $600 billion by 2023. The largest spending category is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), followed by Platform-as-a (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
After reading this article, you will understand the state of cloud computing today and learn how to identify risk mitigation strategies required for cloud-based applications, especially mission-critical apps you migrate to the cloud.
1. Security
Cloud computing services store data in a way that you cannot always know its exact physical location. Therefore, data security is a major concern for future technology adopters and current users alike.
This, combined with the difficulty many organizations have trusting third parties in their data, is making cloud security an increasingly important challenge for almost every IT organization. Recent improvements include improved identity and access management (IAM) strategies, the use of multi-factor authentication, and centralized logging that is now offered by all cloud providers.
2. Cost Management
All major cloud providers have highly detailed service pricing models that clearly define the cost of storing and processing data in the cloud. This can be a problem because the range of available options is so wide and cloud environments are highly fluid, making cost control a common issue with cloud services.
Companies often waste money on redundant resources, such as unused workloads or expensive storage. According to a recent survey, 36% of organizations cited optimizing their cloud costs as a top cloud challenge. The solution for organizations to closely monitor cloud usage and continuously optimize their service, instance, and storage choices using purpose-built automation tools.
3. Governance
Cloud governance is a set of techniques and policies for ensuring the privacy and security of cloud data. It is often a major challenge, with organizations confused about who is responsible for data stored or processed in the cloud, who authorizes the use of cloud resources, especially in a self service model, and how regular employees should treat sensitive data.
The answer is for an organization’s IT department to align existing controls and governance processes to include cloud environments and ensure everyone is up to date. This is the only way good governance, risk management, and compliance can be implemented.
4. Cloud Optimization Strategy
Choosing the right cloud adoption strategy is another major challenge. Many enterprises have taken a granular approach, migrating different use cases, applications, and projects to different cloud providers. A problem facing many enterprises in this context is the lack of a comprehensive multi cloud strategy across the organization.
Finding the right cloud adoption strategy goes back to cloud governance issues. Strong, clear cloud governance policies enable organizations to create a unified, optimized cloud usage strategy.
5. Expertise
The success of your cloud computing adoption depends on cloud expertise. The complexity and variety of tools in cloud technology can make it a challenge to keep up with the available options for every use case.
Organizations must strike the balance between having appropriate in-house expertise and the cost of hiring a dedicated cloud expert or team. Perhaps the best solution to this problem is to provide additional cloud computing training to existing IT staff.
6. Outages
In cloud computing, there has always been a concern over loss of control, especially for companies that depend on cloud vendors to run their mission-critical applications. As you move your business to the cloud, you may become dependent on the cloud providers. This means that if your cloud provider goes down or experiences a misconfiguration, your business can be impacted. As reliance on cloud backup solutions increases, it becomes even more important that the cloud providers themselves do not fail.
The risk of cloud outages cannot be ignored. Even the major cloud providers are vulnerable. In 2021, for example, Amazon experienced an outage that brought down several large apps, from Slack to the Epic Games Store.
This means organizations need some kind of recovery solution for data held by cloud-based services. Some powerful options for hybrid disaster recovery are available, which combine public cloud resources with on-premise resources. Azure Site Recovery and Amazon Connect are two examples. These services give you peace of mind that even if your primary cloud provider fails, you can continue to perform critical business functions.
Conclusion
Using the cloud presents significant business challenges, but it is important to note that there are mature solutions to overcome all these potential challenges.
Cloud computing provides the benefits of significantly reducing hardware capital expenditures and promoting scalability, consolidating growing workloads and improving collaboration with employees accessing projects in real time. Despite the challenges, this makes it a valuable investment for almost any organization.
