Cloud growth across Europe is continuing to grow; wide-scale adoption can be seen in most markets as public, private and hybrid solutions prove their worth.
However, despite large adoption of the technology there are still many organisations which are wary of adopting. This can be attributed to a number of reasons which can be considered a threat to cloud.
CBR presents the 5 main threats to cloud adoption, growth and sustainability.
1. Education
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to jump for the cloud market is education. It is a topic which HP, SAP and many others have spoken about when growth in cloud adoption is raised.
Mnay organisations lack the knowledge of how cloud can benefit their organisation. Often it is unknown what cloud can do and what options are available to organisations of any size. This is an issue which requires industry wide action to help improve the communities’ awareness of what is out there.
Companies such as HP have been vocal in its calls for a "Cloud of Clouds" a kind of cloud library where services are clearly listed and where certified cloud vendors are made available.
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Xavier Poisson, Vice President Cloud Computing, HP EMEA, told CBR not long ago that education is the number one problem to solve for cloud and if cloud wants to reach everyone, then education is key.
2. Security
Of course security needs to be taken into consideration when choosing to adopt a cloud service, organisations rightly want to feel that the security of the network is going to be of paramount importance to the cloud service provider.
Handing over control to a cloud vendor can be a scary step to take.
For some, it is clearly felt that the potential risk still outweighs the benefits and they just don’t feel that their business would be safe in a cloud.
Of course data breaches come under this bracket as well and a security flaw in a multi-tenant cloud service database could lead to many clients’ data being leaked.
However, there are methods to help control any data leak with an encryption key, although if you lose that then you lose your data.
3. Vendor lock -in
Often, organisations are fearful of being tied into one vendor due to being tied to a software which expects one type of architecture or because of contractual reasons.
This concern could be seen as part of the fall out from the recession, organisations are more wary about being tied down to a 10 or 15 year contract with one vendor. And when you consider how quickly the market can change, you can see that this is a valid reason to be careful about adoption.
In reality though, these fears are likely to be unfounded. Cloud is designed to be a flexible solution, so shorter term contracts are more likely and more often are being offered as pay as you use models, so organisations shouldn’t fear vendor lock-in too much.
4. Downtime
The concern of losing access to data and services can be the stuff of nightmares for business leaders, who dread the kind of outages that have affected some cloud providers over the years.
Sudden outages can cause not only great frustration but also lead to a loss of money if your organisation can no longer access what it needs to run the business.
Research shows that even a load time of 4 seconds or more can lead to a potential customer leaving your site. And it doesn’t just stop with someone having a poor experience on your site, it could damage the brand if there are constant problems.
While it may not necessarily have been caused by your cloud provider, it can often get the blame and can affect your business.
5. Value for money
This is both a big reason for adoption and a reason for not adopting, simply put, some companies do not see the value in adopting cloud services.
The price wars going on between Amazon, Microsoft and Google are heavily reducing the cost of adopting a cloud service, however, some organisations still see that keeping things in house is the cheaper way to go.
The likelihood in the future is that your organisation will operate both an on premise and off premise solution, these will help to manage your business while reducing costs and workloads for you IT.
What is also becoming more common is the use of multiple clouds.This approach is likely to create reduced prices as vendors are forced to price the offerings a lot more competitively.
