There are many known benefits that cloud computing has brought to businesses over the years. When it comes to cloud computing, most people focus only on the benefits though — glossing over the inevitable disadvantages.
Even though cloud computing works for most businesses, it’s important to recognize that there are some downsides before making the switch. Here are three such disadvantages.
Concerns over control
Depending on the services needed for a business, some cloud users have discovered that they don’t have the level of control over certain functions and/or executions of services as they would want. This could be caused by end-user license agreements (EULA) or the provider’s management policies, both of which can dictate limits on the actions that customers can perform with their deployments.
Here’s how to maintain control:
- Choose a cloud provider partner.
- Ensure you have a good understanding of your service level agreement (SLA) as well as how the SLA will affect agreements with customers.
- Understand the responsibilities of both your cloud vendor and your team.
- Learn your provider’s level of support, specifically their basic support versus what costs extra.
Cost
The final costs associated with adopting cloud computing for a business depends on whether you’re looking for a small-scale adoption or for short-term. In these instances, cloud computing can be an expensive endeavor.
Although pay-as-you-go allows for flexibility and some cost savings (unless you’re sure of what your business needs), the cost could still be higher than anticipated. It’s better to experiment with the cloud offerings until you know what services best fit your needs.
Some ways to reduce costs:
- Avoid over provision
- Try to pre-pay for cloud services
- Track spending with alerts
- Don’t run instances if they aren’t being used
Downtime
Often, network downtime is labeled as the most common cloud computing disadvantage. Given the nature of how the internet works, there’s always the possibility of a service outage, which will leave your business with no way to operate until the problem is resolved.
How to prepare for and mitigate downtime:
- Have a disaster recovery plan in place that will allow for the shortest recovery time (RTO) possible and has recovery point objectives (RPO).
- If your business can’t tolerate much downtime, consider using services from multiple regions and that have automated failover.
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