Being on the Cloud enhances business agility and gives you cost savings and increased efficiency. As the Cloud adoption is increasing, a range of misconceptions or myths have developed around it. Cloud computing is a mystery for many businesses and this has resulted in building up of plenty of myths around deploying and running applications on it. These myths are largely due to lack of understanding of Cloud services, where users are still under dilemma of whether to move to Cloud or not. Here are clarifications regarding some of the common misconceptions or myths surrounding the Cloud today.
Cloud is not secure
Security concerns are the main barriers to adoption of the Cloud computing. This is more prevalent in case of public clouds where clients share computing resources.
Top cloud providers incorporate a layered security infrastructure that features extensive surveillance systems, firewalls and protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Security is the most important concern for Cloud providers. They thus offer enhanced security, which, in many cases, surpasses security levels at on-premise data centers.
Cloud is for small businesses
Cloud is highly popular among small businesses because it eliminates the need of upfront capital expenditure and doesn’t require dedicated IT personnel. Cloud providers ensure cost efficiency for small business by taking care of installations, updates, security and backups.
But that doesn’t mean that the Cloud is only for small businesses and not for large-sized businesses.
The adoption of public Cloud is less for large businesses but adoption of private and hybrid is quite high.
Cloud is adopted only to save costs
Cloud does have cost benefits and capabilities to reduce capital expenditure, but that is not the only reason why organizations choose the Cloud platform.
Some organizations don’t want to recruit IT staff or maintain the IT infrastructure, which leads them to adopting Cloud. Cloud helps businesses to increase efficiency and they are able to focus on higher value work. Moving to Cloud is a strategic decision, and there are many reasons behind it. Not all organizations focus on upfront costs, but on total cost of ownership.
Cloud solutions are not customizable
This is again a well-known myth about Cloud solutions.
There are varied Cloud computing services available for businesses to adopt from. There are different deployment models like public, private and hybrid Cloud solutions. You can even use a combination of them as per your business needs. Apart from these, there are different ways in which Cloud services can be packaged like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With these options available, customers can mix and match a combination of services as per their requirements.
Cloud will replace traditional data centres
The Cloud market is growing and it is replacing traditional data centres but it is not certainly going to replace all of them.
There are many large enterprises who still use their own data centers for certain computing needs, helping them gain maximum efficiency and maintain their own infrastructure rather than relying on Cloud services.
Traditional data centers will not be completely replaced by Cloud anytime soon.
Cloud is same as SaaS
Cloud is not synonym to SaaS.
SaaS refers to Software as a Service. It is a model in which the Cloud service provider hosts applications and makes them available to users over the internet. It is a widely-adopted model but that doesn’t mean Cloud is only SaaS.
Other than SaaS, there are:
PaaS: Platform as a Service which allows a customer to rent virtualized servers and associated servers to run existing applications or to design, develop, test, implement and host applications.
IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service which provides customers with hardware, storage, servers and data center space or network components. Instead of having to purchase hardware outright, customers can buy IaaS.
There’s only one Cloud
Cloud is singular, but doesn’t mean there’s only one Cloud. In fact, there are many.
There is public, private and hybrid Cloud.
There are so many Cloud vendors in the market to choose from who provide their own Cloud services including giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc.
Conclusion
Cloud computing myths are therefore a result of miscommunication and assumptions. In this post, we have tried to cover some common myths, there are many others like once you are in the Cloud, you can’t back out, migrating applications to the Cloud is complex, Cloud is unreliable etc. In reality, Cloud computing helps businesses to accelerate growth. Choosing the Cloud platform should be done on facts and by focussing on your business needs, putting asides the myths. Proper planning and strategizing will help you to realize full benefits of this platform!
