The Risks and Trade-Offs of Cloud Based Services
The Risks and Trade-Offs of Cloud Based Services
I was trying to add an item to my shopping cart, but the site was giving me an error message, saying "this item is not in the catalog anymore". While I was trying again and again, I was getting different errors including the site wasn't available at all. I started searching web for outage reports but couldn't find anything recent. What I found were the exactly same outages (the same type of errors were reported) a couple of years ago and one even a couple of weeks back. Every time Amazon released a note that they are working to determine the source of the problem. There were some speculations that heavy demand for newly released game at that time caused the site to crash. Finally today I was able to complete my order with Amazon.
This event made me think about growing reliance on online services and the risks associated with it. The tendency today is to leave expensive investments in hardware and licensed software packages and move to more affordable online solutions. Moving to cloud makes a lot of sense, but involves risks very much similar to my experience with Amazon. Only in this case the results were painless for me.
Simple logic says - it is all about control. You don't really have any control over the servers that contain your data in the cloud. You rely on professionals claiming high level of knowledge and experience in protecting your data and making it available for you at all times. They take a lot of trouble and pain from you, like a worry about backups, viruses, remote access and maintenance. If anything happens, they fix it on their end, making all the problems disappear without even visiting your office, because you don't have it in your office anymore. It's in the cloud.
On the other hand, nothing is perfect and even the big guys like Amazon fail to keep their site alive sometimes.
Despite all the outages and insecurity we feel with cloud based solutions, I think it is going to grow more. All the downtimes and outages that we are exposed to are nothing comparing the complexity and cost of running similar solutions in house. And nothing protects us from even bigger problems happening on our fully controlled in house servers.
Yes. The cloud (or any other solution) isn't going to be perfect anytime soon, but with growing capacity of internet communication networks we are all be moving to cloud. It just makes perfect sense.
The author is a co-founder of thatWise - leading provider of IT auditing services. Enjoy Free TV Online Simply and Swiftly Watch Houston Rockets vs Phoenix Suns Online Free Live NBA Stream or Watch Sheffield United vs Nottingham Forest Online Live Feed Duty-Free Shop Online - Even the Busiest Traveler Can Shop Duty Free Forex Trading Hours - The Busiest and Slowest Times to Trade Watch Los Angeles Lakers vs Atlanta Hawks Online Live NBA Scores Watch Portland Trail Blazers vs Miami Heat on PC Online Live Free Work Experience can Earn you Credit when Earning an Online College Degree Online college degree cost – Increase Your Savings by Attending an Online College Getting your online college bachelors degree Online colleges – So Many To Choose From Keep yourself up to date with online college degree Get qualified- online college degree program