To Cloud or Not to Cloud

To Cloud or Not to Cloud

We hear a lot about Cloud recently, and most of the organizations are moving to cloud. By doing so they offload the responsibility of data center maintenance, new hardware procurement, Software licensing, and managing servers to cloud provider. As this is not only time consuming but also very expensive to maintain and manage them. I would personally feel that “business is always about making right choices at right time”. Moving to cloud is also such decision.

Below is the recent trend analysis based on RightScale 2019 reports about to Cloud adoption-

The number of respondents now adopting public cloud is 91 percent, while the number of respondents now adopting private cloud is 72 percent, as a result, the overall portion of respondents using at least one public or private cloud is now 94 percent

As use of public cloud has grown, so has the amount of spend. Public cloud spend is quickly becoming a significant new line item in IT budgets, especially among larger companies.

Among all respondents, 23 percent spend at least $2.4 million annually ($200,000 per month) on public cloud while 33 percent are spending at least $1.2 million per year ($100,000 per month).

Hmm.. it looks like most the organizations are moving to cloud? Is it really beneficial?

Well, the answer is yes. Cloud is beneficial if you understand its pros & Cons and create a strategy based on your organization needs. While a cloud environment does come with inherent risks, it can also offer tremendous benefits.

Here are few benefits and gotcha’s:

 Benefits –

• You have an application which is experiencing sudden spike in traffic and it’s becoming difficult to scale up and scale down the resources on the fly. Whereas, Cloud can help in scale up and scale down resources on the fly based on your needs without procuring and keeping the physical resources on standby with unnecessary expenses.
• Cloud will help you in reducing operational costs, while increasing the effectiveness of IT processes.
• Self Service portal – End users can request the services without any intervention of administrators
• Cloud will help you in fast application implementation and deployment, and thus you can focus more on development while reducing infrastructure overhead.
• Cloud will help you in expanding your business geographically with minimum cost.
• It’s becoming more difficult and expensive to keep up with your growing needs
• Cloud disaster recovery systems can be implemented much more quickly and give you much better control over your resources.
• IT infrastructure updates and maintenance are eliminated, as the hardware and all the resources are maintained by the service provider. You can just sit back and relax while enjoying with a simple web-based user interface for accessing software, applications and services – without the need for installation, maintenance and upgrade
• Capex to Opex – Cloud shifts IT expenditure to a pay-as-you-go model, which means you will only pay for what you consume. which is a striking benefit, especially for small scale businesses.

Gotcha’s –

While your specific environment will determine the risks that apply to you, there are some general risks associated with cloud that you will want to consider.

• Even though cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks.
• Unplanned downtime- There are few unplanned downtime reported recently in public cloud and which resulted in huge business impact to many customers. Until cloud provider fix and resolve the issues, you will not have control over your servers.
• Few operations might suffer from added latency when using cloud applications over the internet.
• If your hardware is controlled by someone else, you might lose some transparency and control when debugging performance issues. Its like parking your vehicle in someone’s garage and you are totally depending upon the owner of garage for your car safety.
• Noisy “neighbors” also a major concern as the underlying resources are shared across multiple tenants or users. 
• There are certain applications design and architecture might not completely follow distributed cloud architectures, and therefore may require some amount of modification before moving them to the cloud
• Cloud or vendor lock-in is one the major risk, as once you are in cloud, it might be difficult to leave or move between cloud to on-prem or cloud to cloud.

Mostly, the cost of cloud will be less than the cost of buying, supporting, maintaining, and designing the on-premises infrastructure needed for your application to run — with minimal hassle.

By leveraging cloud, we can move faster and with the minimal upfront capital investment needed. Overall, the finances of the cloud will actively work in your favor when developing and deploying your business services.

“There will always be a couple of niche examples where the cost of cloud is prohibitively more expensive than traditional infrastructure. So, design and implement strategically based on your organization needs and goals.”

Conclusion:

Cloud adoption is on the upsurge every year, and it doesn’t take long to understand why. Enterprises recognize cloud computing benefits and see how they impact their production, collaboration, security and income.

By using a cloud-based solution, an enterprise can prevent a lot of problems that outbreak organizations that rely on on-premises infrastructure.

“Every organization is different, and it has its own demands and needs. Act accordingly by taking a right decision at right time. “