Summary

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There are a variety of technical and business challenges for cloud adoption to aid organizations to achieve cloud design, deployment, migration and services to satisfy IT demands and maintain low-costs.

Little to no up-front cost in purchasing servers, buildings and floor space, cooling systems and electricity are clear advantages to cloud computing. There are a variety of other costs savings associated with cloud computing such as hardware savings, staff savings and software licensing savings. Product time to market can be increased using cloud computing as well as increased and improved customer satisfaction. With the use of cloud computing, there is less to manage internally while integrating the latest technologies. Scalability and flexibility of services saves companies money by pay-per-use models. However, while there are many advantages to cloud computing there are also disadvantages. Leading the list of disadvantages is security. Security concerns include data transmission, application and storage. Legal issues arise regarding regulation as providers can store and process data in the cloud anywhere in the world. This leads to legal risks such as software licensing and data protection. Lack of standardization is another concern. Organizations are leery of lock-ins and loss of governance of information. An additional concern is the lack of easy transfer from one cloud provider to another. Pricing modules are not standardized and as a function of data lock-ins, will provider’s rates increase to the point of being more expensive than in-house data services.

Most research points to cloud computing being a good fit for startup, small or medium sized businesses. No up-front costs for computing power that could be equivalent of a large enterprise are an advantage most of these companies would otherwise not have. Therefore, we agree that cloud computing is a good fit for these types of businesses. However, if dealing with critical data that requires high security, cloud computing may not be an option regardless of the size of the business. For large corporations with well-established enterprise systems, moving to the cloud may not be warranted or cost effective. One advantage a large corporation may exercise is the use of cloud computing for non-critical data such as email and office.

We argue there is no one best solution that fits all business types when deciding to adopt or migrate into cloud computing