There are many reasons why Cloud is being adopted by enterprises and why some are holding back. Apart from the obvious reasons from the definition, the following is a good list of reasons for the Why and Why not….
Factors appealing to Cloud adoption:
- Cost savings in terms of software licenses, hardware, labor, IT support and maintenance. 20 to 29% cost savings identified by IBM survey as the threshold.
- Faster time to value including relieving IT resources, ability to scale resources and simplifying system updates or upgrades.
- Improve system availability and reliability.
- Improved automation including provisioning and de-provisioning
- Focus on Core Business Competency
- Sustainability
Concerns delaying Cloud adoption of “Public Cloud” offerings. Public Cloud offerings provide the most cost savings but the following are some of the concerns from enterprises
- Business Continuity and Service Availability
- Data lock-in due to proprietary storage API
- Data confidentiality/Auditability
- Data transfer bottlenecks
- Performance Unpredictability
- Security and privacy
- Service quality and performance
- Hard to integrate with in-house IT
- Insufficient responsiveness over the Internet
- Maturing Cloud eco-system
- Not enough ability to customize
- Bringing back in-house may be difficult
- Regulatory requirements
- Portability across vendors
- Unknown ROI and potential risk
Even though the concerns are from established enterprises, small firms and startups can leverage the potential of elasticity and lower cost of Cloud and provide the functions of their bigger counterparts. This is a major advantage for the small enterprises which was unimaginable before.