The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing, pros and cons of cloud computing, features of cloud computing, limitations of cloud computing

THE PROS AND CONS OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is one of the most exciting exploding areas of information technology today. One of the key concepts in the cloud is you have a shared pool of configurable resources. This means sharing the data center with other clients that are using those resources and that's key because it drives the cost down of the data center to pay for all that hardware.

Features of cloud computing

The delivery of services is on-demand over the internet.

You only pay for what you use and this is called a utility computing model. It is like the electric service you only pay for the power that you use and so this is a flexible model if you're not using something you can turn it off or delete it. It is a much more flexible model than having a physical data center where you're filling it up with hardware to meet most demand.

There is no startup cost. There is no long-term contract you have to sign you're only paying for what you use and if you provision a server there's no fee to a provision that server you simply pay for it when you start using it.

You can pay as you go. So there's no long-term contract required that's a great advantage. But, you can lock in a discount if you sign a long-term contract for resources. So that you can negotiate lower prices by locking in a longer contract term.

Lots of flexibility you can manage the entire operation from a web browser. With the flexibility of the cloud, you don't need any special access they can manage the entire operation from a web browser.

In the shared infrastructure lowers the cost because there are many customers that data center cost is spread across and it provides a kind of data center cost that are helping to lower the cost for all the rest of the customers.

It also provides a very high degree of availability these data centers that are operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide incredibly high degrees of availability as well as failover to other data centers that they own in case of a problem.

The pros of cloud computing

Trade capital expense for a variable expense. What does that mean? In a traditional model, you would have a significant upfront investment in equipment servers, racks, data centers. In the cloud, you don't have any upfront expense you pay as you go and pay for what you use. So it is a very efficient model. In a traditional project, you may have to go out and buy a bunch of servers extra rack space even some more networking equipment and if that project goes away or gets canceled for some reason then you're stuck with all that upfront investment with the cloud you don't have any kind of issue you stop delete the servers that you have remove the networking from the cloud and your charges will stop.

Stop guessing about capacity

You can quickly add and easily adjust capacity up and down. So if you have a huge increase in demand on the current product that you can easily scale up in the cloud and if that demand is seasonal something like a Christmas rush or something like that you can easily scale down and you don't have to pay for that upfront investment of the equipment a very efficient model.

Increase speed and agility

One of the things about the cloud is you can provision resources very quickly and your infrastructure can adapt, and quickly changing the market. So as things change in the last few years, there's been a lot of uncertainty in the market. The cloud is very good for speed and agility and again adapting to that.

Focus on what matters

You can focus on what matters and spend time on developing applications that add value to your IT operations and not spending time on infrastructure.

Go global in minutes

Because of the massive scale of shared infrastructure and cloud providers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure have worldwide data center coverage and you can take advantage of that for a fraction of the cost that you couldn't do on your own. So those are the big advantages that you can trade capital expense for variable expense, you can stop guessing about capacity, increase speed and agility, focus on what matters and go global in minutes.

Some of the cons of cloud computing

You don't have physical control of your environment. And can't schedule a visit to an AWS data center and see your servers that are running in the cloud. It is not possible due to the security constraints and you share that infrastructure with many other customers. So it is impossible to say well my server is running here in this particular location in this AWS data center.

Some regulated industries need physical custody of data and processing equipment some highly specialized applications. And regulated industries may need that you have physical custody of certain types of data and house it in your data center.

Network latency

Network latency is a little too great for some applications. If your application requires that the processing be very close to a user the latency between your users in the cloud may be too great for very specific types of applications. For example, if you have a flight control system the onboard flight computer has to process those instructions in a very quick manner. So you couldn't have something operating over a wireless network and trying to control a flight system the latency would be too great for that.

When you go to the cloud it is easy to provision resources. It can lead to problems if you do not have a good governance set of rules in your organization to control. You might get cloud sprawl where people are provisioning all kinds of servers, network resources, and costs may go through the roof if you don't have good controls on it. In some ways, the ease of provisioning resources can be a double-edged sword you might over-provision resources because it's so easy to do.

Conclusion

The cloud has many significant advantages as opposed to operating your data center. Those in terms of flexibility, speed, and agility. But, not all applications are suited to run in the cloud and these are a few examples of those things.