How Can You Overcome the Barriers to Cloud Adoption.

I came across an article titled “Three Flawed Issues about Cloud Computing” by Larry Bonfante, a practicing CIO and founder of CIO Bench Coach, LLC. He asserts that CIOs who embrace cloud computing are able to focus less of their time on the utility aspect of IT and more of their time on adding business value to their organization. This is one of the most commonly cited benefits of cloud adoption, and most evident where public cloud services are adopted.

Security concerns can usually be addressed though the implementation of the right enterprise risk management strategy based on a proper analysis of the issues and concerns. It is true that some intelligence services like the CIA have adopted cloud computing, and it is reasonable to assume that a lot of effort would be applied to securing the cloud environment. Security receives a lot of attention, particularly with respect to cloud computing. Some would have us believe that there is such a thing as 100% secure. What organizations need to do, with cloud or on-premise IT service, is assess the level of risk they can tolerate and implement the appropriate measures.

The article also sites compliance as another reason some clients make for not migrating to the cloud. While this might have been valid in the past, more and more cloud service providers are achieving the appropriate certifications. That said, migrating to the cloud requires careful consideration of your workload profiles and characteristics to select what is most suitable to be deployed in a cloud environment.

The third and final concern is resilience. This might simply be due to negative publicity when there is an outage. This could be compared to travel by road or air. While traveling by air is a lot safer than traveling by road, most passengers are more apprehensive of air travel because they feel they have little to no control over events. The cloud consumer has to rely on and trust the cloud provider to deliver the services they require within the terms of the negotiated service level agreement. What cloud consumers need to do is assess the disaster recover and business continuity plans in place to ensure they are satisfactory.

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