Now that we have discussed what cloud offerings we have, let's see the challenges that we might have to face:
- Increased Security Vulnerabilities: When we plan to adopt cloud services in our architecture trust plays a huge role. Because when data is with us, it is under our complete control. We control the services accessing the data, along with privileges, encryption, and many other things. But when it comes to moving services to cloud its often a very tough call as we are giving all our data and control to cloud. And most times the encryption and security plays a major hindrance while adopting cloud. Thus, security can be a major topic to discuss when it comes to risks involved in cloud.
- Reduced operational governance control: As we know by now our infrastructure is shared by other customers of the cloud vendor as well, it brings some constraints to handling the governance aspect for enterprises. You literally lose control over data. And internet is the only connectivity between enterprise and cloud - one more hurdle while taking care of governance. The following figure illustrates this:
- Limited portability between cloud providers: Given we have many cloud vendors now and no industry standards in terms of technology or communication between services it becomes very difficult for customers to switch from one cloud provider to another. Most of the services are custom built by cloud providers, thus limited portability. The following figure shows two different cloud providers and the features they support for a cloud consumer:
- Multi-Regional regulatory and legal issues: When cloud vendor start establishing their data centers across globe the priority is often given to electricity prices, ease of starting data centre, geographical region, potential customers coming from same region and many more. Thus, due to this many time enterprises don't have grasp over the flow of data. But it is taken very seriously by many enterprises and governments. Many countries have a common policy of making companies retain data of the their citizens in the same country. Sometimes, this can become a cause of companies not adopting cloud based solutions.
Now that we understood risk and challenges of cloud computing let's try and understand about cloud analytics.