The emergence of cloud as the pioneer in technology has been the talking point of many discussions and conventions over the years. It has set the benchmarks that won’t be scaled anytime soon. The services and features on offer make it imperative for the firms to have the cloud model or face the chin music.
Other than the obvious technical edge it provides, what makes the cloud model standout is its eco-friendliness and ability to reduce the carbon footprint of the firm. And throw the cost savings in the mix, you get a combo that is all conquering.
But wait! All is not sunshine in the cloud, as there are lot of factors that make the cloud equally susceptible and vulnerable to shortcomings as have been its predecessors.
Here are some of the factors that will make you rue your decision to move to the cloud.
1. Don’t turn a blind eye
- Make sure you are getting what you were promised by the vendor. More often than not, most of the services are skipped by the vendor and the firm also blindly trusts without going into the details of the offer.
- Make sure that the SLA is completely and unambiguously written down.
- One factor that is often overlooked is the opinion of the employees. Though it may seem a trivial thing to do but is the most important as they are the ones who would be working on the new equipment, so they should be eased into the evolution rather than forcing them into a revolution.
2. Don’t go with the flow
- The Second mistake is switching to the cloud because everyone else is.
- The important thing to do when pondering over whether to switch or not is finding out does your company really need the cloud. Don’t follow the crowd and take the plunge just because your competitor is doing it. Make the switch only if you feel the need to do so.
- Not doing so can lead to employee dissatisfaction and can affect the business productivity in a negative way.
- When switching to cloud it is important that everyone is on the same page and is equally excited by the advent of a new dawn.
3. Due diligence
- Research well before zeroing upon the vendor from which you are planning on getting your cloud services. Sometimes it might happen that your cloud experience is spoiled by the incompetence of your provider and you may remain with a bitter taste in your mouth.
- Make sure that a certain amount of due diligence goes into choosing the vendor and the services offered by them are well looked into and make sure they are not too good to be true.
4. Latency
- Latency is defined as the delay between the request made and response received.
- It generally depends upon the traffic and the connectivity.
- The issue of latency is a long standing one in the cloud environment. The access to information is depended upon the traffic that is operating, if it is high then you would have to wait unnecessarily as in-house servers have zero latency.
5. Transparency issues
- The executives of the company gets very paranoid if anything happens to their data, and in case of the cloud their data is not even in their hands, making them highly uncomfortable.
- Moreover you do not remain in command of your data and the provider himself decides where to store it and how to store it.
- So make sure you don’t give your highly critical data to the provider and the data provided is not highly critical.
6. Not everything is made for cloud
- It is quite possible that the data you are trying to put on the cloud is not made for the cloud, and rather than benefitting your businesses it takes it on a downhill.
- There have been some integration issues in the cloud that needs to be dealt with and until they are gone, cloud is not a full-proof place.
7. Other issues that have been plaguing cloud
- Performance Issues
- Internet Dependency issues
- Compliance issues-different countries have different laws related to data storing and uploading creating issues which cannot be known beforehand.
- Outages-although the data centers have different types of backups still there have been issues of power outages leading to huge losses.
Conclusion
The issues faced in the cloud are completely avoidable if enough caution is shown by the owner. Additionally if the vendor keeps everything transparent the cloud experience becomes good for every party involved.
About the Author: Josephine Clark is a Cloud and Mobile Technology enthusiast and an avid writer. Other than working at QuickBooksCloudHosting DotCom, she actively participates in various forum discussions, writing blogs and articles on topics like latest mobile apps, updates of Operating systems, Cloud hosting services such as QuickBooks hosting, etc.
Photo credit: perspec_photo88
