Ever since its introduction, the cloud computing has been consistently scaling new height of popularity. The reasons why it is getting more and more popular are its cost effectiveness, multifaceted characteristics interspersed with Hardware, Software and Complex Networking, its global availability, and top of all it is available on the basis of you pay only for what you use. Because of its visible advantages, more and more business houses are going for cloud. Despite of this fact, the recent survey conducted by one of the prominent market survey organization has revealed that majority people were unaware about what exactly the Cloud Computing is. This is bound to lead to misconception about cloud computing.
Cloud Computing is Insecure
Data Security is something that every one and every organization is always concerned about, and their concern for it can be very well understood. But many a time, what we expect is something else and the reality is something else. This is the case with data security, may it be with the data sitting on a cloud network or any conventional network. No one can provide you 100% security to your data, and unfortunately we may or may not desire this is fact. Therefore, cloud is no exception.
However, cloud provides comparatively more security to your data because the cloud environment is segmented and encrypted as well.
The resources in cloud environment is generally distributed among many places yet it acts as a single intact entity. This multi location data storage provides a reasonable level of security to your data against any intrusion in comparison to where all your data is saved on a single storage point.
Cloud is Costly Solution and is Meant only for Larger Organizations
As against the common belief that cloud is a costlier solution and is affordable only to larger sized organizations, fact is cloud computing is a cost effective solution because here you are paying for what you have used. Moreover, maintenance cost, licensing cost, software upgrade cost are almost nil, and you do not have to invest your precious time to any of above tasks. Instead, it is taken care of by the on site team.
Therefore, we can say that both large and small scale business houses are equally benefited by cloud computing, and the data also show that there is a clear upsurge in the usage of this technology by all.
Cloud can give 100% Uptime
As 100% security can not be guaranteed, so is the case with the uptime. Certainly Cloud Computing network ensures more up time than the conventional network but expecting 100% uptime may result into disappointment.
Sometime you may encounter with dual point failure, i.e. failure to connect to Internet from both your side and your service provider side too. Sometime, because of local outage at your ISP you may experience a downtime while your service provider does not have any issue at their network. This can be resolved only by creating redundancy at local level.
Yet some other time, if one node in cloud network has failed, it immediately attempt to transfer all the hosted services into another node but it is only possible if the destination node has the same amount of free resource as that of the first one. If this does not match, there is a down time even in cloud environment.
So in spite of guarantee being offered by service provider, one should understand the limitation of technology and maintain a realistic approach.
Customers lose control in the cloud
Believing that going cloud will result into loosing control over your own data is not correct. If this would have been true, no one would have thought of going ‘Cloud”.
You certainly loose control on those things that are there in order to increase the cost effectiveness of Cloud Computing. For example, one of the prominent features of Cloud is SaaS (Software as a Service) and it is offered as a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a Service for users across net. In SaaS all tasks related to Software installation, upgrading, and maintenance are carried out at remote location by expert team, this is in order to alleviate the burden of these tasks from customer’s shoulders. Here, the users loos control over software version and requirement. The other terms in this category are PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), that has the same scenario.
The advantages of the cloud have been proven for businesses of any size. Cloud technologies are faster to deploy, and it requires minimum technical understanding for how to manage it. These advantages allow the small business owner to focus on what is most significant for growing their business. Cloud Computing works for everyone, and improves both the bottom-line as well as the top line growth.
