What Factors Will Prohibit Organisations From Moving To The Cloud?

The Public Cloud

In the IaaS space, the public cloud lends itself heavily to the SMB and start-up market because of smaller user numbers, fewer SLAs, off the shelf applications and only basic security compliance needs. 

However, for medium to large enterprises, apart from SaaS, the public ‘multi-tenant’ cloud is seen as too high a risk for the majority of their systems for the following reasons: Security and regulatory compliance, Lack of enterprise grade features such as DR and backup, Lack of performance based SLAs, Complex transitions and migration paths, Lack of standards (portability), Data versus server locations, Reliability.

Although the public cloud is generally unsuitable for enterprise production systems, there is no doubt it can be an appealing proposition for test and development environments.  

This is where provisioning can be achieved in seconds, security compliance is often less of an issue and the ability to scale down as well as up is commercially very attractive.

The Private Cloud

So if enterprises aren’t moving their production systems into the public cloud, how can they take advantage of the commercial and operational benefits that cloud computing promises to deliver? 

There has been a lot of talk over the last 12 months about the ‘private cloud’ where enterprises essentially look to introduce cloud methodologies into their own IT organisation.  

Unfortunately more often than not, virtualisation is being confused with cloud computing when actually virtualisation should only be seen as one of enablers for cloud.