Today, Cloud Computing has become popular among the businesses. Whether it is small, medium or large organizations, all are moving their IT infrastructure to cloud. It has evolved as a game changer for IT companies.
Industry experts praise this technology and believe that this trend will only grow and develop in the upcoming years. It is without any doubt highly beneficial to small scale businesses but it is essential to know its pros and cons.
In this post, we shall provide you with various advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing for small businesses. There are many business people who usually are confused whether they should go with Cloud Computing or not.
But before getting into it, let me give you some basic knowledge about Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing primarily refers to the delivery of computing services such as storage, servers, networking, database, analytics and software over Cloud. Cloud here means the internet. The companies, who provide these services are known as Cloud providers.
There are three categories of Cloud Computing that includes Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure -as-a-Service (Laas).
Cloud Computing is one of the cheapest ways to use, maintain and upgrade. An old desktop version of the software was costlier to the companies. You had to pay the license fee which if you choose multiple user's options, it was very expensive for the companies to go longer.
Dramatically, Cloud has completely changed the entire scenario as it comes at very cheap rates and can cut down some valuable expenses of the company. There is no need for infrastructure and premises. Therefore, the operation as well as administration costs are removed.
Cloud Computing brings reliability to your organization. Due to its self-managed service platform, it is far better than in-house IT infrastructure. With Cloud, you will get Service Level Agreement that provides you 24x7 connectivity. It's massive pool of IT resources and quick recovery mechanism allows you to manage everything perfectly.
Means, if a server gets failed due to whatever reasons, all the hosted applications and services could be easily transferred to any available resources.
This is another plus point with Cloud Computing. Due to its central administration of resources, SLA-backed agreements and vendor managed infrastructure; Cloud Computing can simplify and enhance IT management capabilities. There is no need to update and maintain IT infrastructure as the service provider supports all these things.
For accessing software, services and applications you get a web-based user interface and without any installation.
Unlike other platforms, Cloud provides you unlimited storage capacity. Therefore, you need not worry about storage and space availability.
With Cloud, it becomes much easier for you to store your data in the cloud and get backup anytime as compared to any of the physical hard drive or devices. Cloud service providers usually handle all your recovery problems. Therefore, backup and recovery comes in much easier and simpler ways than any other traditional methods.
Cloud Computing has made software integration much easier. It happens automatically and you don’t need to make extra efforts to integrate applications and software. You just need to choose which software suit is the best for your enterprise according to your needs, Cloud would do the rest.
The moment you register yourself in the cloud you can get the access to your system and information anywhere, wherever there is internet connectivity. With this, it has removed geographical and time-zone barriers.
Security is leading concern with Cloud Computing. Before you go with this innovative technology, you should understand that the moment you gets into this, all your information surrenders with an unknown cloud service provider.
It means that there is an enormous risk related to security. Therefore you must wisely chose your service provider. You should only go with a service provider who you think will keep your information completely secure.
With Cloud, you are bound to be a victim to any technical difficulty sometime. First of all, you should know that any technology always comes with some outages. The usual problem that you face would be related to network and connectivity. You need a perfect internet connection to get connected with a server 24x7.
Hence, you should always go with that service provider who has high-end support and maintenance standards.
It is evident that when you store your information in the cloud, you may face external threats and hack attacks. You are also aware of this fact that nothing is entirely secure with the internet.
As the entire Cloud services are owned and managed by the service provider, customers get very less control over it. They can only manage and monitor data, services and applications. All the back-end management is handled by the service provider. The customers cannot access some key managing tasks like updating, firmware management, and server shell access.
Till you can maintain good internet connectivity all your business applications would run fantastic. But if at any time, your service providers lose connectivity, all your work gets shut down and you are out of business. Even some of the best servers will not work in downtime. Getting a proper backup is important.
Every single thing on this planet has pros as well as cons. No one is perfect so is Cloud Computing. Technology always proves to be the biggest asset for your company and can transform your faith, but on the other side, it may create serious hurdles if not used and handled properly.