Danny Sullivan
The advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing (cloud hosting) that you should know
It is a no brainer that a lot of businesses and organizations nowadays are utilizing and taking advantage of the innovative ways of cloud-hosting. Indeed, cloud hosting makes people’s jobs a whole lot easier.
No doubt that businesses can reap a lot of benefits from cloud computing such as the IBM i hosting, but despite its advantages, also comes with some drawbacks as well, so it would be important for you to take time in understanding the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing, so you might get the most out of technological tool designed for business whichever cloud provider you are planning to hire.
Advantages
- Cost saver- Perhaps, the most significant cloud hosting benefit that your company can get in terms of your Information Technology (IT) department is saving a lot of costs. Businesses regardless of their type and size exist solely for money while keeping capital and operational expenses to a minimum level. By using cloud hosting, your company will save substantial capital costs which has zero in-house server storage as well as application requirements rather than investing on your own that costs a lot.
- Reliable- Because of managed service platform through cloud hosting your company is now more consistent especially your IT infrastructure because a lot of service providers offer a Service Level Agreement or SLA that guarantees its clients a no time-off and downtime operation and a hundred percent availability.
- Manageable- Cloud hosting can provide you an enhanced and simplified IT management as well as maintenance capabilities by using central administration of your resources as well as vendor managed infrastructure and an SLA backed agreements from the service provider.
- Strategic edge- The increasing computing resources gives you a competitive edge over your competitors in your chosen industry, as the time you have required it as one of your IT assets. Your company can deploy mission-critical applications which can deliver great and significant results and benefits without any upfront costs and minimal provisioning time as well.
Disadvantages
- Unexpected downtimes- As cloud service providers promised to take care of their clients, it is inevitable that it would eventually be overwhelmed and may even come up against any technical issues that need maintenance which results to downtimes.
- Security concerns- Although cloud service providers always uphold the safety of its clients by maintaining the best security standards in the industry, however storing data and important files from an external service provider is always an open risk agreement between the client and the latter.
- Vendor lock-in- Cloud service providers may have promised its clients that the cloud will be very flexible to utilize as well as integrate, but switching cloud services is something that has not yet completely changed, that is why there are some organizations that find it difficult to migrate their services from one vendor to another. Hosting and integrating current cloud applications on another platform can throw up interoperability and also in supporting issues.
- Limited control- Since the entire cloud infrastructure is owned by an external service provider, you can transfer minimal control over to your customers. Your customers, on the other hand, can only control and manage the applications, the data, and the services which can be operated freely, and not the entire infrastructure itself.
