Welcome to the Vitado cloud basics series where we help to make understanding the world of cloud computing clear and where possible, simple. 

When considering transitioning to cloud, like any major strategic decision, there are some cons to weigh-up against the many benefits. Some hoops to jump through, pitfalls to avoid and the occasional, giant rolling boulder to Indiana Jones yourself away from. 

So, grab your hat… here’s some typical challenges and concerns around using the cloud: 

1. Data security and Data Location 

Data security and location needs to be considered and scrutinized, as information is stored off-site. 

Highly secure organizations may not want their application to be hosted in the same ‘tenant’ as other organizations. Using tenants really just means that the server running your applications is accessing a shared pool of other resources, such as data storage and so your Cloud Services Provider (CSP) can decrease hosting costs and improve efficiency. But, if you’re so secure that you don’t want to share ANY resources with any other organization, then you can request a more expensive ‘single-tenant’ hosted environment. 

Additionally businesses need to consider the location of their company data and whether the practicality of moving workloads to the cloud could be impacted by national / regional data privacy laws and industry regulations. 

2. Not Every Application You Rely on May Be Built for the Cloud or Be Viable

Some things just aren’t ‘cloud ready’. You may lose functionality or simply not be able to run critical software using cloud providers. Viability therefore needs exploring when developing your cloud strategy. Some workloads may be too critical or have too high usage to be viable, if for example they may be prone to incurring high running costs. 

3. Cloud Brings New Commercial Challenges

Getting on top of sprawling cloud costs regularly tops CIO’s agendas. There are even some terms for the types of mismanagement that frequently occur and yes, they sound like a cartoonish gang of wrestling villains: 

‘Bill Shock’ – resulting from the uncontrolled proliferation of cloud instances and lack of realistic cost projections to stakeholders.  

‘Cloud Sprawl’ – this occurs when resources overlap and aren’t understood in a unified way, leading to additional expense from unorganized, over-provisioning. 

‘Shadow IT’ – refers to resources that you don’t even know about. As decentralized provisioning takes place, business units may simply arrange their own cloud instances, out of sight of IT governance.  

‘Toxic Consumption’ – is when an organization has unmanaged, wasteful consumption of cloud resources.  This can be combatted through a plan of active cloud optimization. 

Its important to be aware of these challenges and get processes and solutions in place to govern your cloud environment. 

4. Cloud Cloud Can Be Expensive

With the cloud you pay to take your data out as well as put in. This means that financially at least, investing in cloud is not that easy to back-out of if the costs become too high. There’s no saying what Cloud Service Providers will do once enough businesses are invested and on the hook. It’s generally considered best practice therefore to work with more than one cloud vendor to balance your risk – the prices you pay now could shoot up and you have little choice but to pay it. So, a ‘multi-cloud’ infrastructure is common. 

It’s all too easy to spin-up cloud resources and lose sight of why or who drove the need – you can’t see these resources and yet pay for what you provision and use, so it’s easy to over-provision and over-spend. The key to controlling this is to have visibility, for which you need a Cloud Asset Management solution that will give you early warning of spikes in usage and visibility of usage and wastage across multi-cloud environments.  

Cloud subscription models favor vendors  

As you’re trading away traditional ‘ownership’ in the form of a purchase cost and then less-expensive on-going maintenance for the convenience of fixed costs and an IT capability that never fails. Over a number of years, subscriptions tend to be higher than Capex costs. 

You’re subject to your CSP for your infrastructure 

This means you have less control. Whilst the cloud offers excellent resilience against service disruption, it is ultimately beyond your control and subject to contractual agreements. Therefore, attention should be paid to the contractual Service Level Agreements and details such as ‘availability zones’. Microsoft Azure for example, have availability zones that are physically and logically separated datacenters, operating from their own independent power sources, network and cooling infrastructure. Connected via an extremely low-latency network, they are the building blocks to delivering high-availability applications. If there were an event at one datacenter, your data are protected. For critical applications it is important to understand that this type of resilient architecture is available and to explore these options with your CSP. 

The flexibility and ease of spinning-up cloud resources helps businesses be more agile but also opens up the risk of businesses paying a premium for cloud computing resource that’s wasteful, a potential security risk and not delivering value to the business. 

The cloud can be tamed however with robust Cloud Asset Management; a combination of skilled cloud people, working to robust and thought-out management processes and underpinning everything, the technology in the form of a multi-cloud management solution to give you centralized visibility and control. 

Keeping these people, processes and technology can be challenging, especially with a global skills shortage around cloud. However, help is at hand – Certero and Vitado can support you with all 3 in the form of Vitado Cloud Asset Management Services, providing skilled resource, best-practice processes expertise and all under-pinned by the Vitado by Certero Cloud Asset Management solution. 

If you’d like to find out more about Vitado’s solutions and services you can use to make sure cloud is visible and costs stay under control, contact Vitado today.