Cloud adoption: Concerns and challenges

In pure business terms, cloud is essentially a flexible, scalable, pay-per-use model for the way IT services are delivered and consumed, typically through short-term contracts. With its pay-as-you go model, cloud moves many IT costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure; its “elastic model” means available IT capability can be flexed to mirror changing business demand; and it enables consumers of IT to have much greater transparency over their costs.

Key benefits of cloud adoption

Financial benefits - Cloud brings benefits across a broad range of financial areas:

• Reduced costs Costs are lower using cloud services compared to bespoke build and maintenance systems
• Reduced total cost of ownership Only the capacity required is paid for, with faster resource availability, providing optimum support to the business
• Reduced capital expenditure IT is purchased as operational rather than capital expenditure
• Costs aligned to business demand Cash flow is improved by spending only when services are required.

Responsiveness benefits

Cloud ensures the organisation is more responsive to business requirements through:

• Instant on Computing resources and systems are available immediately when needed by the business functions
• Universal access Cloud ensures applications and data are available any time, any place, anywhere
• Agile provisioning Cloud provides the ability to react to changing business requirements through the rapid delivery of appropriate IT operational resources.

Cloud adoption has advantages in terms of cost and convenience, it also do have its own concerns and challenges. The adoption of cloud is not just an IT issue; it is of concern to and impacts all parts of the business.

Primary concerns are -

• Security
• Privacy
• Sovereignty

Secondary Concerns are -

• Connectivity
• Reliability
• Contract Lock-in

Although moving to the cloud is not without its difficulties, with careful management these can be mitigated. It is also important to note that the achievable benefits vary for each application or business service that is being migrated to the cloud, depending on several factors, including: the size of the service; service efficiency; the location of the cloud; the cloud variant being migrated to; and the nature of the business itself.

Source/Ref: The White Book Of Cloud adoption By Fujitsu, Cloud Industry Forum.