Tip Of The Day: Dark Side Of The Cloud

My blogger colleague at CE, Kidakaka has already written about all the hype surrounding cloud in his latest entry. While the hypes have traditionally yielded in nothing (SOA, iPhone?), for a change I believe all that hype about the cloud is true.
There is no reason why companies, especially SMBs must NOT choose to put some of their mission critical applications on cloud. Its fast, its nimble and importantly, it is on the go! Companies are finally able to spend on IT infrastructure as commodities.

Having said that, every new technology always have hindsight. Without getting in too much detail, I'll just highlight the three most important ones.

#-Link-Snipped-#1. You are on the public IP- Well, it is like owning a house fitted with a bullet proof glass. Even though it is mostly secure, it is transparent and subject to constant attack. Public IPs are very much vulnerable to hackers. Though best of technologies are available to prevent it. But they will cost you. And then the whole idea of making IT infrastructure nimble goes for a toss. Yes, you can build a private cloud, no doubt. But are you geared up for that cost? Why not own the infrastructure then?

2. What if you are on Mount Everest? - The cloud environs essentially need a good quality Internet connection if you are to access your cloud remotely. If you reach a place where a decent, reliable Internet connection is not available, you WILL NOT be able to access any of your data. Come what may, this problem will remain until the whole world is covered with high speed data connection.

3. What is Plan B for DR? - Backup is another serious issue with cloud. Since most of the applications and sessions are on the fly and on the ip, daily, weekly incremental backups don't work. For cloud, the backup has to be real time and is normally done at multiple locations. This is where the problem arises.

In theory, you can say that the cloud is usually safe for storing the data. But since it is backed up at multiple locations, and using public ips, there is a chance that it might get lost or tampered. It can be made secure with additional firewalls and application level, host level security. But then since most of the times it is accessed from an Internet connection remotely, it makes it very slow. Moreover what if the host goes down? There might be many other challenges.
In my opinion, these are the important ones. Companies are doing their best to overcome them. But today, the challenges remain.