Cloud Computing Benefits and Risks

This blogpost presents cloud computing benefits and risks. Cloud computing brings organizations several benefits:

• Cloud computing relieves the organizations of the difficult task of infrastructure development and management. The cloud providers are mainly responsible for all the management and maintenance related issues.
• Since organizations do not have to develop the infrastructure, consequently, cloud computing brings lots of cost savings, particularly for small organizations. The organizations have the flexibility to pay according to the services they utilize consequently saving lots of upfront costs for infrastructure development.
• Cloud computing also provides scalable, elastic, and efficient services with round the clock availability. The resources and services can be scaled-up and scaled-down according to the varying processing demands of the cloud tenants or consumers.
• The deployment of systems in cloud is easier and faster because the preliminary deployment requirements have already been fulfilled by the cloud providers.
• The organizations do not have to be concerned about the storage and backup issues. Rather all such tasks are the responsibility of the cloud service providers.

Despite its benefits, cloud computing also entails certain risks, for example:

• The first and the foremost threat in the cloud is the security and privacy of the data stored at the cloud. Particularly, the data in public clouds where the consumers do not have control over their data the risks of data disclosure to the unauthorized entities increase manifolds.
• Since the tenants connect to the cloud remotely from different locations, therefore, continuous network connectivity is required to access the cloud services. The network might not be accessible sometimes, for example in case of weather-related issues and hence, the cloud services are not available. This would not be the case when the processing or storage was to be done locally.
• The resolution of technical problems during the operations requires the involvement of the providers which often is not affordable.
• Another problem that the cloud consumers sometimes face is the bandwidth issue when transmitting data to or retrieving from the cloud. To overcome such issues data compression of load balancing techniques are applied.