Power Outages,Server or desktop crashes, cyber attack, natural disasters, and employee sabotage all present serious issues to the lifeblood of the business – your data. Of course, cloud solutions can’t completely eliminate these threats, but it can protect you exponentially more than what you have right now. But Cloud Computing has its own inherent issues like cloud challenges for design , management, security , availability of skill set, consumers and more future
All the problems of cloud computing are directly related to their features: remoteness, distribution, concurrency, abstraction, and so on. In fact, there is nothing wrong with that.
Any phenomenon or object has both positive and negative sides. You have to either put up with the shortcomings, or even refuse to use a specific product. And cloud computing is no exception. Let’s look at their problems and claims that are presented to them now.
So, one of the main problems is the transfer of existing applications to the “cloud” . Firstly, this is not always possible due to the architecture of a particular application, its bindings to other systems or services that will not / will not be transferred to the “clouds” yet.
Often, the transition to cloud computing is not possible due to the use of specific OS APIs or the call of low-level functions to optimize performance. There may not be many such applications, but they are. There are also cases when porting is theoretically possible, but this requires either significant processing of the code or rewriting the entire set of software from scratch. Very often it is economically disadvantageous. In fact, we have been observing a completely similar situation for five years now. Key concepts are 64-bit and multi-core. Especially “good” things are with the last paragraph. How many programs do you know that are optimized to work with multiple cores or threads?
A few percent of all the variety of world software, despite the fact that the “simplest” 2-core CPUs exist on the market, to put it mildly, is not the first year. What can we say about “clouds”, in which you can run thousands of threads at the same time? Finally, there is a whole class of heavy applications that are generally difficult to transfer somewhere — video editors and converters, 3D games, CAD systems and three-dimensional editors, real-time applications, and much more.
However, all these problems are partially solved. A rich set of APIs is created for developers, new models and programming paradigms are offered, tools are developed to simplify work with multithreading, and so on. Even the idea of transferring modern 3D games is not so fantastic – now such a service is being developed. The idea, in fact, is quite simple – the game is launched and rendered on a remote server, and only the video stream is transmitted to the client. (The dream of any copyright holder!) There is only one requirement – a high-quality Internet channel.
And this is another cloud computing problem – the need for a permanent connection to the network. Internet access is lost, and you automatically lose the opportunity to work. Given the Russian realities, this problem can be called paramount. Partial solutions have been around for a long time. For example, GoogleGears allows you to work with GoogleDocs or Gmail offline, and the first time you connect it synchronizes everything with the server. True, a week ago Google officially refused further support for this technology and rely on HTML5’s advanced capabilities for working with local data. Microsoft, in the framework of the Software + Services paradigm (discussed in a previous article), offers a combined approach – part of the data is stored and processed locally, and the rest is given to the “cloud”. But in this case, the emphasis is still on solving another problem – security.
And the first question that worries so many is: “ How reliable is it to keep all my data in the cloud?”In theory, cloud computing is good because data is stored in a distributed form and periodically archived. However, no one is safe from failures. Similar precedents have already been, for example, with Gmail. Then it was possible to recover the information of most accounts, but some still disappeared forever. Love correspondence is one thing, business information is quite another. In the first case, you can get a little burned and forgotten, but the second can threaten at least forced downtime and loss of profit. It is no accident that many business users prefer to store everything on their own servers with a configured backup system. In the end, even if a failure occurs, and the drives are damaged, they can at least be taken out and taken for restoration to the appropriate office. And if this happens somewhere in the cloud, then everything will depend on the conscience of the cloud provider. It is especially “nice” to see the notorious disclaimer in EULA – they say that nothing in the world is reliable. The only solution is to maintain an up-to-date copy of all data outside the “cloud”.
If you look deeper, the problem is rather in the credibility of cloud computing. More precisely, in the fear of many users to lose control over the IT infrastructure. The fact is that the culture of outsourcing is currently underdeveloped, especially in Russia. For many, data centers are just platforms for placing their equipment, but nothing more. However, all these are flowers in comparison with another problem of cloud computing – the confidentiality of stored information. There are two points here. Firstly, no one guarantees that your data will not be viewed and analyzed by a company that provides cloud services. You never know what is written in the confidentiality agreements. In the same Gmail, advertising in an “amazing” way correlates with the text of the message being viewed. Secondly, many forget that data centers are located in other countries and fall under their jurisdiction. For instance, in the USA (the leader in the number of data centers), your data can quite easily be removed under various pretty pretexts like the fight against terrorism. Moreover, you are not even obliged to notify about the fact of seizure! And about where the data then gets, all the more. As a solution, it is proposed to encrypt all the information that is transmitted and stored in the “cloud”. An alternative is to store and process the most critical data locally, and transfer everything else to cloud computing.
However, there are still some cloud computing issues that are more philosophical or moral. For example, some believe that soon we are waiting for an era of ubiquitous monopolies. Google, Microsoft, social networks and the like more and more tied users to their services. It is possible that after some time there will be such a situation that giving up a particular product will become either very difficult or even impossible. Richard Matthew Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, speaks of cloud computing as: “This is nonsense. More precisely, it’s even worse than nonsense – it’s a marketing program based on deception.” He sincerely believes that everyone should store data on their own computer and work with it on it. He believes that cloud computing and services like Gmail are a trap for the user, which firmly ties him to proprietary software and takes control of the information. It is possible that in the future all these services at one point will require payment, and the person will no longer have the possibility of transition. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison generally believes that the term cloud computing is just a marketing lure and often doesn’t make much sense. Some companies simply “trick” their users – they slightly modify their old product, hang the label “Based on cutting-edge revolutionary cloud computing technologies” and sell them for a great price.
So, we examined the main problems of cloud computing. In fact, the list of problems does not end there. Some aspects of cloud computing are not fully understood, so something else may appear in the future. It is difficult to say which of the above problems is the most important. It all depends on the specific situation. You need to understand that cloud computing is not a panacea for all problems – they also have negative aspects. You must also be careful about high-profile statements about the revolutionary nature of new products.
Author Profile
- Amram is a technical analyst and partner at DFI Club Research, a high-tech research and advisory firm .He has over 10 years of technical and business experience with leading high-tech companies including Huawei,Nokia,Ericsson on ICT, Semiconductor, Microelectronics Systems and embedded systems.Amram focuses on the business critical points where new technologies drive innovations.
