Submitted by MSPAlliance Member Kat McClure, Global Marketing Director, StratoGen Hosting-
In spite of the stratospheric rates of both early and late adoption by thousands of enterprises around the world, fears about cloud hosting still persist. Are they founded? Should you as a decision-maker continue to sit on the fence? Let us find out.
Every technology has its own dissenters and skeptics along with its ardent admirers. Cloud hosting is no exception. I have chosen the top 5 stated as well as perceived challenges to enterprise cloud adoption and attempted to provide a fresh perspective. Although worthy of consideration, these causes for anxiety should not stop you from wetting your toes in cloud technology. As they say, the benefits outweigh the minimal risks ten to one.
Data Security
A licensed and accredited cloud hosting solutions provider with a positive industry reputation will be able to afford the highest quality of data security resources when compared to any IT department within an organization. Therefore it is safe to assume that as long as your IT managers and system administrators are willing to partner and cooperate with a hosting solutions company to implement each and every security protection heuristic and augment potential vulnerabilities, your data will remain more secure in the cloud than at your on-ground corporate data center.
Uptime and Performance
CIOs an IT managers have often expressed their concerns about their bread-and-butter enterprise websites going down and not being able to come back quickly in the event of a system wide failure situation. This concern may not be as significant today as it was five years ago. Disaster recovery strategies, technologies and solutions have been able to remain in stride with advances in cloud hosting to the extent that many cloud solution providers are now able to provide guaranteed 0% down time and redundancy.
Data Hijacking
The breach of 2 million CRM data records at Vodafone and the infamous Edward Snowden breach may have certainly put a damper in cloud hosting adoption rates in the past. Ironically however, both were insider acts of compromise and had to do more with mindset than with cloud hosting security. Steps taken by hosting solution providers to further minimize the risks of data compromise have included enhanced levels of data encryption, multiple permissions in which more than one set of login credentials are required to gain access much like two signatures on a check, and other proprietary measures. These methods have undoubtedly made a difference. No system can ever be 100% fail proof and invincible when it comes to insider threats and privileged user access as long as there is a human element involved.
