I have
been working on cloud computing for couple of years now. After the intial
excitement,I thought it would be nice to see if there are any pain points that
are bothering the brave ones that have taken the plunge.Some research on this
topic gave me the below top 10 problems.
and
this will be my first technical blog
1. Online patching in cloud environment
Eg:- Bill
Gillis, director of eHealth technologies implemented an online system that
provides electronic medical records to 1,600 physicians at over 300 locations.
His major
pain point was keeping electronic medical records continuously available while
still patching his virtualized systems promptly to ward off threats. There was
no window in which systems could be taken down for patching.
The
product that they used to do this is from VMware its called vCenter
Update Manager. This product uses vmware technologies to update vm’s online.
2. Complications with mobile apps.
Eg:-
American Airline.
American
airline had an mobile app that was hosted by Microsoft Azure that gave
flight details of customers on their mobile. According to them it was complex
to put corporate user data through a partners cloud service.
The way
they did this was to create a Web service proxy server that brings the data out
from behind the American corporate firewall and makes it accessible to
Microsoft's Windows Azure, which in turn makes it available to Windows Phone
users.
3. Legacy Apps Don't Migrate To The Cloud
The
biggest pain point here is in moving the apps that involves system dependencies
that need to move to the cloud with the application, such as secondary
applications, database systems, identity management.
The real
pain in moving legacy apps to the cloud is financial. Legacy app owners want to
reduce their cost of operation, but a migration to public cloud infrastructure
will not prove cost-effective.
A way to
make use of legacy apps as part of a cloud computing initiative would be to
identify particular services within the application, transforming them into
separate, callable services, and making them accessible as Web services. This
gives companies the option of designing and running "green field"
cloud applications on public infrastructure while still obtaining key services
from the data center.
4.
All eggs(Data) in one basket.
Eg:-
Goggle blogger failure in 2011
If the
service providers vanish someday your data also vanishes.
These can
be easily tackled by having some way to mirror the data & apps on cloud
to your local storage. You can, for example, easily backup all of your Gmail
data on your local hard-drives .
If your
local storage fails, you can grab what you need from the cloud. If your cloud
service fails, you’ve still got it locally. But if you rely just on the cloud,
you’re vulnerable to exactly this sort of failure.
5.
Risk:Legal and regulatory.
Applications
that have legal & regulatory information’s may never make it to cloud.
Its not a great idea to put apps that will expose user sensitive data on cloud
6.App
performance could suffer
A private
cloud might, but a public cloud definitely wouldn't lead to improved
application performance.
"I
couldn't see an investment bank putting a latency-sensitive application on an
external cloud," adds Steve Harriman, a vice president at NetQoS.
7.
Bandwidth could bust your budget.
Every
day, Sony animators access and generate between 4 and 12 terabytes of data.
"The network bandwidth we'd need to put that into someone's cloud and to
read it back is tremendous, and the cost would be so large that we might as
well buy the storage ourselves rather than paying someone else for it,"
says Nick Bali, senior systems engineer at the Culver City, Calif..
Sony
first considered going public cloud but finally decided to go for something
private .They were evaluating a private storage cloud, using ParaScale's
cloud storage software for this purpose.
8. Security Risks
This is
perhaps the most visible and riskiest component of the cloud. From customer
records being hacked to cloud providers denying responsibility, to major brands
being damaged as a result, security is always an issue.
9. Hidden Costs
One of
the major draws for cloud computing is that it promises a low-cost alternative
to enterprise applications, especially for the SMB market.
However,
with the addition of user licenses, customizations, added functionality, what
started as a cheap application can balloon into an expensive one without proper
over sight. Other hidden costs include the cost to manage the application,
which usually does have to involve IT once an application reaches
enterprise-scale.
10. Service Levels Mismatch.
Some
enterprises have discovered that the level of service they expected has not
held up, and without an airtight contract it is difficult to enforce. Because
cloud-based apps can often be assigned to a departmental budget, it can become
a real challenge when a cloud application grows across an enterprise, and there
weren’t the necessary service agreements put in place from the beginning
because IT wasn’t involved. It can be difficult to track back and remedy this
when a cloud-based application proliferates throughout a company.
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