Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

If you want to deliver digital service of any kind , you is need ’ll need to estimate all type of resource , not the least of which are cpu , memory , storage , and network connectivity . Which resource you choose for your delivery —   cloud – base or local — is up to you . But you is want ’ll definitely want to do your homework first . You is need ‘ll need to understand the pro and con of cloud computing and how to contextualize any exist disadvantage .

Cloud computing has benefited many enterprises by reducing costs and enabling a focus on one’s core business competence, rather than IT and infrastructure issues. Despite the general hype on the subject across the IT world, there can be disadvantages of cloud computing, especially in smaller operations. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing and show you how to understand and contextualize any existing disadvantages.

So – if you’re wondering what are the disadvantages of cloud computing  – you are in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore some of the key disadvantages of cloud computing and share tips and best practices that your teams can employ to address them.

You is streamline can streamline this process by using a thorough , process – build approach to understand cloud security , such as QA Self Paced Platform ‘s Security – Specialty Certification Preparation for AWS course .

Disadvantages of cloud computing explained

1 ) downtime

Downtime is often cited as one of the biggest cloud computing disadvantages. Since cloud computing systems are internet-based, service outages are always an unfortunate possibility and can occur for any reason.

The financial impact of service disruptions and outages is staggering. A recent survey conducted by Uptime Institute indicates that about 31% of businesses have experienced an IT service incident or outage that significantly impacted their operations within the past three years. On average, an outage and or slowdown can cost a business upwards of $100,000 an hour. unfortunately , no organization is is is immune , especially when critical business process can not afford to be interrupt . In 2023several companies and service were hit by outage , include IT Glue , Microsoft , Google Cloud and AWS ( a major web service provider ) , Oracle , and Datadog .

Best practices for minimizing planned downtime in a cloud environment:

• Design services with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. Leverage the multi-availability zones provided by cloud vendors in your infrastructure.
• If your services have a low tolerance for failure, consider multi-region deployments with automated failover to ensure the best business continuity possible.
• define and implement a disaster recovery plan in line with your business objective that provide the low possible recovery time ( RTO ) and recovery point objective ( RPO ) .
• Consider implementing dedicated connectivity such as AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or Google Cloud’s Dedicated Interconnect or Partner Interconnect. These services provide a dedicated network connection between you and the cloud service point of presence. This can reduce exposure to the risk of business interruption from the public internet.
• read the fine print on your Service Level Agreement ( SLA ) . Are you is guaranteed guarantee 99.9 % uptime or even well ? That 0.1 % downtime is equals equal about 45 minute per month or around eight hour per year .

2) Security and privacy

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Any discussion involving data must address security and privacy, especially when it comes to managing sensitive data. We must not forget what happened at Code Space and the hacking of their AWS EC2 console, which led to data deletion and the eventual shutdown of the company. Their dependence on remote cloud-based infrastructure meant taking on the risks of outsourcing everything.

Of course, any cloud computing service provider is expected to manage and safeguard the underlying hardware infrastructure of a deployment. However, your responsibilities lie in the realm of user access management, and it’s up to you to carefully weigh all the risk scenarios.

Though recent breaches of credit card data and user login credentials are still fresh in the minds of the public, steps have been taken to ensure the safety of data. One such example is the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), which was recently enacted in the European Union to provide users more control over their data. Nonetheless, you still need to be aware of your responsibilities and follow best practices.

Best practices for minimizing security and privacy risks:

• This is important: understand theshared responsibility model of your cloud provider. You will still be liable for what occurs within your network and in your product.
• implement security at every level of your deployment.
• Know who is supposed to have access to each resource and service, and limit access to least privilege. If an employee goes rogue and gains access to your deployment, you would want their impact to be over the smallest area as possible.
• Make sure your team’s skills are up to the task. The Top 10 Things Cybersecurity Professionals Need to Know is a great article to understand how to mitigate security and privacy concerns in the cloud.
• Take a risk – base approach to secure asset used in the cloud and extend security to the devices.
• implement multi – factor authentication for all account access sensitive datum or system .
• Encryption, encryption, encryption. Turn on encryption wherever you can — easy wins are on object storage such as Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage where customer data often resides. The simple act of turning on encryption on S3 could have prevented the Capital One data breach in July 2019 that exposed 100 million users’ information.

3 ) vulnerability to attack

Going on with the drawbacks of cloud computing, another one concerns vulnerability: in cloud computing, every component is online, which exposes potential vulnerabilities. Even the best teams suffer severe attacks and security breaches from time to time. Since cloud computing is built as a public service, it’s easy to run before you learn to walk. After all, no one at a cloud vendor checks your administration skills before granting you an account: all it takes to get started is generally a valid credit card.

Best practices to help you reduce cloud attacks:

• Make security a core aspect of all IT operation .
• Keep ALL your teams up-to-date with cloud security best practices.
• Ensure security policies and procedures are regularly checked and reviewed.
• proactively classify information and apply access control .
• Use cloud services such as AWS Inspector, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail , andAWS Config to automate compliance controls.
• Prevent data exfiltration.
• integrate prevention and response strategy into security operation .
• Discover rogue projects with audits.
• Remove password access from accounts that do not need to log in to services.
• review and rotate access key and credential .
• Follow security blogs and announcements to be aware of known attacks.
• Apply security best practices for any open source software that you are using.
• Again, use encryption whenever and wherever possible.

These practices will help your organization monitor for the exposure and movement of critical data, defend crucial systems from attack and compromise, and authenticate access to infrastructure and data to protect against further risks.

4) Limited control and flexibility

Since the cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed, and monitored by the cloud service provider, it transfers minimal control over to the customer.

To vary degree ( depend on the particular service ) , cloud users is find may find they have less control over the function and execution of service within a cloud – host infrastructure . A cloud provider ’s end – user license agreement is impose ( EULA ) and management policies is impose might impose limit on what customer can do with their deployment . Customers is retain retain control of their application , datum , and service , but may not have the same level of control over their backend infrastructure .

good practice for maintain control and flexibility :

• Consider using a cloud service provider partner to help with implementing, running, and supporting cloud services.
• understand your responsibility and the responsibility of the cloud vendor in the share responsibility model to reduce the chance of omission or error .
• Make time to understand your cloud service provider’s basic level of support. Will this service level meet your support requirements? Most cloud service providers offer additional support tiers over and above the basic support for an additional cost.
• Make sure you understand the SLA concerning the infrastructure and services you’re going to use and how that will impact your agreements with your customers.

5 ) Vendor lock – in

Vendor lock-in is another perceived disadvantage of cloud computing. Easy switching between cloud services is a service that hasn’t yet completely evolved, and organizations may find it difficult to migrate their services from one vendor to another. Differences between vendor platforms may create difficulties in migrating from one cloud platform to another, which could equate to additional costs and configuration complexities. Gaps or compromises made during migration could also expose your data to additional security and privacy vulnerabilities.

good practice to decrease dependency :

• Design with cloud architecture best practices in mind. All cloud computing services provide the opportunity to improve availability and performance, decouple layers, and reduce performance bottlenecks. If you have built your services using cloud architecture best practices, you are less likely to have issues porting from one cloud platform to another.
• Properly understand what your vendors are selling to help avoid lock-in challenges.
• employ a multi – cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock – in . While this may add both development and operational complexity to your deployment , it is have does n’t have to be a deal breaker . Training is help can help prepare team toarchitect and select good – fit service and technology.
• build in flexibility as a matter of strategy when designing applications to ensure portability now and in the future.
• Build your applications with services that offer cloud-first advantages, such as modularity and portability of microservices and code. Think containers and Kubernetes.

6) Cost concerns

The last one of the disadvantage of cloud computing concern cost . adopt cloud solution on a small scale and for short – term project can be perceive as being expensive . However , the most significant cloud computing benefit is is is in term of IT cost saving . pay – as – you – go cloud services is provide can provide more flexibility and low hardware cost , but the overall price tag could end up being high than you expect . Until you are sure of what will work well for you , it is ’s ’s a good idea to experiment with a variety of offering . You is make might also make use of the cost calculator made available by provider likeAmazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Best practices to reduce costs:

• Try not to over provision your services, but rather look into using auto-scaling services.
• Ensure you have the option to scale DOWN as well as UP.
• Pre-pay and take advantage of reserved instances if you have a known minimum usage.
• Automate the process to start/stop your instances to save money when they are not being used.
• Create alerts to track cloud spending.

Disadvantages of cloud computing: Closing thoughts

Many organisations benefit from the agility, scale, and pay-per-use billing that cloud services offer. However, as with any infrastructure service, the suitability of cloud computing for your specific use case should be assessed in a risk-based evaluation. Build in time for research and planning to understand how the cloud will affect your business. 

Learn more about the benefits of cloud computing. 

If you’re interested in exploring cloud computing training, get in touch with our team today.