Though cloud provides advantages such as elastic scalability, reduced costs, easy access and business agility, but for efficient operations, migration to cloud often requires identification of correct workload, security and privacy, quality of service, cost savings potential, network performance and integration complexity. This can lead to delays in cloud adoption and hamper organisation’s performance.
Organisations have built up extensive experience in managing and optimizing their cloud deployments for the safety and security of cloud infrastructure. Though cloud computing does not appear to be risky, companies have experienced some problems, such as outages and integration failures.
According to a survey conducted by The Economist, the following are the major implementation issues that organizations have reported while migrating to cloud:
Of the total companies surveyed, about 72% of the companies reported that they suffered at least one of the above issues. The following were reported to be the major reasons for the issues:
Apart from the above issues, following are some of the key issues specific to cloud implementation, which lead to cloud migration delays for organisations:
| Issues | Description |
|---|---|
| Cloud Interoperability | In cases where all the components cannot be moved to the cloud, local applications must interact with applications on cloud for the system to work efficiently. If the proprietary cloud APIs are not well integrated with the company’s existing legacy systems, this can lead to delays and other issues. Multiple clouds can make these issues even more acute. The complexity of the interoperability (not just integration) of devices and data sources gets particularly challenging. — Don Whittington, VP und Chief Information Officer (CIO), Florida Crystals |
| Data security concerns | Though companies can access data stored in the cloud, they cannot secure or control it. This makes them hesitant to use cloud services for applications that involve critical or confidential data. The cloud introduces new security challenges, and legacy security systems based on physical attributes such as port and protocol just aren’t adequate to secure these highly dynamic environments. — Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst bei der Enterprise Strategy Group |
| Portablity | If the company’s infrastructure and applications are not transferable to the cloud, they have to be rewritten in order to integrate them in the new cloud framework. This problem generally arises when the company’s infrastructure is obsolete or incompatible with cloud. These portability issues can cause long delays. People talk about cloud solutions, and you might think they are easy. They are not easy. That was a lesson we learned. You have to be enterprise-ready. You’re taking an enterprise-ready solution and plugging into your environment, and where there are deficiencies, you’re going to find out quickly. — Robert Owens, CIO, Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General |
| Bandwidth and Network latency issues | The management of cloud services can become challenging if there are issues related to network latency and flexibility of WAN bandwidth. If the client’s network is not upgraded and have such bottlenecks, the migration to cloud could become slow or impossible. In recent years, bandwidth issues have increased because of the emergence of IoT. The convergence of IoT and cloud tends to generate zetabytes of data from diverse traffic sources. This can make latency and timeout issues even more acute. In the wake of IoT adoption and the increased contention for bandwidth right-sizing becomes a critical factor for capacity planning of the Cloud. — Les Williams, CMO, ExterNetworks |
| Conflict of interest | The adoption of cloud could also become complicated if there is a conflict of interest between the vendor and the client. For instance, in some cases, the locations that are favourable for the vendor due to their cost-effectiveness are not suitable for the customer due to security and compliance issues. For instance, IT projects in Canada are prohibited to use US-based hosting environments. |
