Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing.
Every thing as two sides of a story. So does for cloud computing.
We are living in the fast-paced digital era where our life revolves around technology.
This creates the large market for every business to make their presence irrespective, whether you are small scale industry or large scale.
And Cloud Computing offers you a platform to mark your presence globally within economical cost without worrying about the infrastructure involved.
Cloud computing is computing based on the internet.
It is the on-demand delivery of computing power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Cloud computing makes provisioning, scaling, and maintenance of your apps and servers a breeze.
You can provision databases and servers quickly and have your app up and running in no time using cloud computing.
Using the cloud computing tools, you can monitor your system to keep the track of uptime, response time, and proactively alarmed if an issue arises.
Below are the benefits of Cloud computing:
Cost Effective.
Cloud computing cuts the high cost involved in infrastructure and their maintenance.
A user can utilise the computing solution offer by public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Google rather purchasing the expensive hardware.
Lack of on-premise infrastructure will eventually reduce the maintenance and any operational cost involved.
Since it’s your cloud computing service’s job to upgrade your system with new patches, this happens automatically. You need not spend money on fancy, time-consuming hardware upgrades.
Scalability
There will be many scenarios during your operation where you want to scale up your resources, for example, the traffic on your website is exponentially increasing or scale down your resources in case you are not getting enough response on your website, you might need to involve your IT experts and include new hardware to accommodate these changes.
But using cloud computing you can scale up or scale down your resources and storage quickly, allowing flexibility as your needs change.
Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades yourself, your cloud service provider can handle this for you. Using the cloud frees up your time so you can get on with running your business.
Reliability
Cloud computing is much more reliable and consistent than on-premise IT infrastructure.
All cloud service providers guarantees 24x7x365 and 99.99% availability as Service Level Agreement. This helps any organization to enjoy a massive pool of redundant IT resources, and a quick fail-over mechanism.
Flexibility & Accessibility.
As far as you have the available Internet connection, you can access your resources from anywhere.
Also, it allows an employee to maintain their work life balance, as they need not be in the office to access any of the resources they can access to their data while they are off-site and can connect to their virtual office, quickly and easily.
Collaboration
Cloud environment gives your business the ability to communicate and share more easily outside of the traditional methods.
If you are working on a project across different locations, you could use cloud computing to give employees, contractors and third parties access to the same files.
Teams have quickly realized that working within the cloud is the most efficient use of everyone’s time.
Being able to view and edit documents in real-time alongside colleagues who aren’t physically there has led to increased productivity and quality of work from organizations who have made the jump to cloud-based document sharing.
Disaster Recovery.
The most significant feature of cloud computing is to have a disaster recovery and backup mechanism.
Since all data/information stored on the cloud, so it’s easy to back up or restore the same data on a cloud in distinction to a physical device.
In case of any disaster in any region where your application or storage is hosted, the cloud provider will automatically provision infrastructure to host your application or data in next available server or region as per your configurations provided.
Also, cloud provider gives you the access to configure your disaster recovery server and backups.
Infinite Storage.
The most favourable advantage of cloud computing to provide ability to store a huge amount of data in contrast to desktop computers.
Cloud offers a limitless storage capacity.
In short, we can say that cloud has eradicated the worries related to the storage space.
In fact, it provides extra space for business needs to upgrade computer hardware, which lowers the overall IT Systems cost.
Environment-Friendly.
The companies that use cloud computing needs on server space that lower their carbon footprint. Using cloud means 30% less use of energy and carbon emission than on-site servers.
A small organization, their estimated carbon emission is 90%.
Switching to the cloud from physical storage and on-site equipment eliminates much of the waste and pollution that comes with discarding hard drives, paper, and ink.
But as coin always has two sides, there are few cons for using cloud computing, as mentioned below:
Security & Privacy.
Security is the biggest concern with cloud computing, although they ensure to implement the industry’s best security standards and certifications.
By leveraging a cloud based infrastructure, a company gives away their private data and information, data that might be sensitive and confidential.
It is then up to the cloud service provider to manage, protect and keep them, thus the provider’s reliability is very critical.
The ease in buying and accessing cloud services can also give despicable users the ability to scan, identify and exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities within a system.
Similarly, privacy in the cloud is another huge issue. Companies and users have to trust their cloud service vendors that they will protect their data from unauthorized users. The various stories of data loss and password leakage in the media does not help to reassure some most concerned users.
Dependency and vendor lock-in
One of the major disadvantages of cloud computing is the implicit dependency on the provider.
This is what the industry calls “vendor lock-in” since it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to migrate from a provider once you have rolled with him.
If a user wishes to switch to some other provider, then it can be tedious and cumbersome to transfer huge data from the old provider to the new one.
Hosting and integrating current cloud applications on another platform may throw up interoperability and support issues.
Limited control and flexibility.
Since the applications and services run on remote, third party virtual environments, companies and users have limited control over the function and execution of the hardware and software.
The customer can only control and manage the applications, data and services operated, not the back-end infrastructure itself.
Technical Difficulties and Downtime.
Cloud providers has to take care of several clients each day. They might get overwhelmed and may even come up against technical outages. To get the enterprise support, business need to spend a hefty amount on support.
This can lead to your business processes being temporarily suspended.
Also, if your internet connection is offline, you cannot access any of your applications, server or data from the cloud. Also, as a minor detail, it might take several minutes for the cloud to detect a server fault and launch a new instance from an image snapshot.
