It is evident that the cloud is expanding. Since we live in a digital age, where data discovery and big data simply surpass the traditional storage and manual implementation and manipulation of business information, companies are searching for the best possible solution of handling data. Traditional spreadsheets no longer serve their purpose, there is just too much data to store, manage and analyze. Be it in the form of online BI tools, or an online data visualization system, a company must address where and how to store its data. Even the most traditional sectors have to adjust.

Though the opportunities are great, this explosion hasn’t come without issues in cloud computing. Now let’s go over more of those challenges that organizations are facing, and how they are being addressed.

In January 2018, RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey on the latest cloud trends. They questioned 997 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud infrastructure. Their findings were insightful, especially in regards to current cloud computing challenges. To answer the main question of what are the challenges for cloud computing, below we have expanded upon some of their findings and provided additional cloud computing problems that businesses may need to address.

The summary of Rightscale cloud challenges survey is,

Security and spend are the top challenges. Security is a challenge for 77 percent of respondents, while 29 percent see it as a significant challenge.

Managing cloud spend is a challenge for 76 percent of respondents, while a smaller 21 percent see it as a significant challenge.

As companies become more experienced with cloud, the top challenge shifts. Security is the largest issue among cloud beginners, while cost becomes a bigger challenge for intermediate and advanced users.

Let us have a look into each of these challenges in detail,

1) Security 

For the longest time, the lack of resources/expertise was the number one voiced cloud challenge. In 2018 however, security inched ahead.

security has indeed been a primary, and valid, concern from the start of cloud computing technology: you are unable to see the exact location where your data is stored or being processed. This increases the cloud computing risks that can arise during the implementation or management of the cloud.

Cybersecurity experts are even more concerned about cloud security than other IT staffers are. A 2018 Crowd Research Partners survey found that 90 percent of security professionals are concerned about cloud security. More specifically, they have fears about data loss and leakage (67 percent), data privacy (61 percent) and breaches of confidentiality (53 percent).

Headlines highlighting data breaches, compromised credentials, and broken authentication, hacked interfaces and APIs, account hijacking haven’t helped alleviate concerns. All of this makes trusting sensitive and proprietary data to a third party hard to stomach for some and, indeed, highlighting the challenges of cloud computing.

Luckily as cloud providers and users, mature security capabilities are constantly improving. To ensure your organization’s privacy and security is intact, verify the SaaS provider has secure user identity management, authentication, and access control mechanisms in place. Also, check which database privacy and security laws they are subject to.

While you are auditing a provider’s security and privacy laws, make sure to also confirm the third biggest issue is taken care of: compliance. Your organization needs to be able to comply with regulations and standards, no matter where your data is stored. Speaking of storage, also ensure the provider has strict data recovery policies in place.

2) Managing Cloud Spend

As previously mentioned, the RightScale report found that for some organizations managing cloud spending has overtaken security as the top cloud computing challenge. By their own estimates, companies are wasting about 30 percent of the money they spend on the cloud.

Organizations make a number of mistakes that can help drive up their costs. Often, developers or other IT workers spin up a cloud instance meant to be used for a short period of time and forget to turn it back off. And many organizations find themselves stymied by the inscrutable cloud pricing schemes that offer multiple opportunities for discounts that organizations might not be utilizing.

Multiple technological solutions can help companies with cloud cost management challenges. For example, cloud cost management solutions, automation, containers, serverless services, autoscaling features and the many management tools offered by the cloud vendors may help reduce the scope of the problem. Some organizations have also found success by creating a central cloud team to manage usage and expenses.

3) Lack of resources/expertise

Lack of resources and expertise ranked just behind security and cost management among the top cloud implementation challenges in the RightScale survey. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of respondents listed it as a challenge with 27 percent saying it was a significant challenge.

As Cloud Engineer Drew Firment puts it:

“The success of cloud adoption and migrations comes down to your people — and the investments you make in a talent transformation program. Until you focus on the #1 bottleneck to the flow of cloud adoption, improvements made anywhere else are an illusion.”

Isn’t it making sense to you also? Well, I would say a big thumbs up to his quotes.

While many IT workers have been taking steps to boost their cloud computing expertise, employers continue to find it difficult to find workers with the skills they need. And that trend seems likely to continue. The Robert Half Technology 2018 Salary Guide noted, “Technology workers with knowledge of the latest developments in cloud, open-source, mobile, big data, security and other technologies will only become more valuable to businesses in the years ahead.

Many companies are hoping to overcome this challenge by hiring more workers with cloud computing certifications or skills. Experts also recommend providing training to existing staff to help get them up to speed with the technology.

4) Governance and control

Proper IT governance should ensure IT assets are implemented and used according to agreed-upon policies and procedures; ensure that these assets are properly controlled and maintained, and ensure that these assets are supporting your organization’s strategy and business goals.

In today’s cloud-based world, IT does not always have full control over the provisioning, de-provisioning, and operations of infrastructure. This has increased the difficulty for IT to provide the governance, compliance, risks, and data quality management required. To mitigate the various risks and uncertainties in transitioning to the cloud, IT must adapt its traditional IT governance and control processes to include the cloud. To this effect, the role of central IT teams in the cloud has been evolving over the last few years. Along with business units, central IT is increasingly playing a role in selecting, brokering, and governing cloud services. On top of this third-party cloud computing/management providers are progressively providing governance support and best practices.

5) Compliance

One of the risks of cloud computing is facing today is compliance. That is an issue for anyone using backup services or cloud storage. Every time a company moves data from the internal storage to a cloud, it is faced with being compliant with industry regulations and laws. For example, healthcare organizations in the USA have to comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), public retail companies have to comply with SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). The recent flurry of activity surrounding the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)  has returned compliance to the forefront for many enterprise IT teams.

Depending on the industry and requirements, every organization must ensure these standards are respected and carried out.

This is one of the many challenges facing cloud computing, and although the procedure can take a certain amount of time, the data must be properly stored. Cloud customers need to look for vendors that can provide compliance and check if they are regulated by the standards they need. Some vendors offer certified compliance, but in some cases, additional input is needed on both sides to ensure proper compliance regulations.

6) Managing Multi-Cloud Environments

Challenges facing cloud computing haven’t just been concentrated in one, single cloud. Most organizations aren’t using just one cloud. According to the RightScale findings, 81 percent of enterprises are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, and 51 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy (public and private clouds integrated together). In fact, on average, companies are using 4.8 different public and private clouds.

In the RightScale survey, 81 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. Enterprises with a hybrid strategy (combining public and private clouds) fell from 58 percent in 2017 to 51 percent in 2018, while organizations with a strategy of multiple public clouds or multiple private clouds grew slightly.

Multi-cloud environments add to the complexity faced by the IT team. To overcome this challenge, experts recommend best practices like doing research, training employees, actively managing vendor relationships and re-thinking processes and tooling.

7) Performance

When a business moves to the cloud it becomes dependent on the service providers. The next prominent challenges of moving to cloud computing expand on this partnership. Nevertheless, this partnership often provides businesses with innovative technologies they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. On the other hand, the performance of the organization’s BI and other cloud-based systems is also tied to the performance of the cloud provider when it falters. When your provider is down, you are also down.

With an inherent lack of control that comes with cloud computing, companies may run into real-time monitoring issues. This isn’t uncommon, over the past couple of years all the big cloud players have experienced outages. Make sure your provider has the right processes in place and that they will alert you if there is ever an issue.

For the data-driven decision-making process, real-time data for organizations is imperative. Being able to access data that is stored on the cloud in real-time is one of the imperative solutions an organization has to consider while selecting the right partner.

8) Building a private cloud

Although building a private cloud isn’t a top priority for many organizations, for those who are likely to implement such a solution, it quickly becomes one of the main challenges facing cloud computing – private solutions should be carefully addressed.

Creating an internal or private cloud will cause a significant benefit: having all the data in-house. But IT managers and departments will need to face building and gluing it all together by themselves, which can cause one of the challenges of moving to cloud computing extremely difficult.

It is important to keep in mind also the steps that are needed to ensure the smooth operation of the cloud:

• Automating as many manual tasks as possible (which would require an inventory management system)
• Orchestration of tasks which has to ensure that each of them is executed in the right order.

That being said, it is obvious that developing a private cloud is no easy task, but nevertheless, some organizations still manage and plan to do so in the next years.

9) Migration

While launching a new application in the cloud is a fairly straightforward process, moving an existing application to a cloud computing environment is far more difficult. A Dimensional Research study sponsored by Velostrata found that 62 percent of those surveyed said their cloud migration projects were more difficult than expected.

More specifically, many of the companies migrating applications to the cloud reported time-consuming trouble-shooting (47 percent), difficulty configuring security (46 percent), slow data migration (44 percent), trouble getting migration tools to work properly (40 percent), difficulty syncing data before cutover (38 percent) and downtime during migration (37 percent).

To overcome those challenges the IT leaders surveyed said they wished they had performed more pre-migration testing (56 percent), set a longer project timeline (50 percent), hired an in-house expert (45 percent) and increased their budgets (42 percent).

10) Vendor Lock-In

Currently, a few vendors, namely Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle OCI, and IBM Cloud, dominate the public cloud market. For both analysts and enterprise IT leaders, this raises the specter of vendor lock-in.

In a Stratoscale Hybrid Cloud Survey, more than 80 percent of those surveyed expressed moderate to high levels of concern about the problem.

“The increasing dominance of the hyper-scale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end-users and other market participants,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

“While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organizations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market. In response to multi-cloud adoption trends, organizations will increasingly demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offerings without penalties.”

Experts recommend that before organizations adopt a particular cloud service they consider how easy it will be to move those workloads to another cloud should future circumstances warrant.

11) Immature Technology

Many cloud computing services are on the cutting edge of technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and advanced big data analytics. The potential downside to accessing to this new and exciting technology is that the services don’t always live up to enterprise expectations in terms of performance, usability, and reliability.

In the Teradata survey, 83 percent of the large enterprises surveyed said that the cloud was the best place to run analytics, but 91 percent said analytics workloads weren’t moving to the cloud as quickly as they should. Part of the problem, cited by 49 percent of respondents, was immature or low-performing technology.

And unfortunately, the only potential cures for the problem are to adjust expectations, try to build your own solution or wait for the vendors to improve their offerings.

12) Integration

Lastly, many organizations, particularly those with hybrid cloud environments report challenges related to getting their public cloud and on-premise tools and applications to work together. In the Teradata survey, 30 percent of respondents said connecting legacy systems with cloud applications was a barrier to adoption.

Similarly, in a Software One report on cloud spending, 39 percent of those surveyed said connecting legacy systems was one of their biggest concerns when using the cloud.

This challenge, like the others mentioned in this article, is unlikely to disappear any time in the near future. Integrating legacy systems and new cloud-based applications requires time, skill and resources. But many organizations are finding that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the potential downside of the technology. Look for the trend toward cloud adoption to continue, despite the potential cloud computing challenges.

In the End – the Cloud Still Wins

It is no secret, cloud computing is revolutionizing the IT industry. It is also shaking up the business intelligence (BI) landscape, and well, pretty everything else it touches. As the cloud adoption exponentially grows, businesses of all sizes are realizing the benefits. For startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs), that can’t afford costly server maintenance, but also may have to scale overnight, the benefits of utilizing the cloud are especially great.

So, what are the challenges faced during storing data in the cloud and how to overcome them?

While cloud computing challenges do exist, if properly addressed, these issues don’t mean your IT roadmap has to remain anchored on-premise. Clearly, organizations have some demanding work ahead of them, especially since the adoption of the cloud is becoming a business standard that will grow exponentially.

To make the best out of it and overcome issues, you should take a strategic iterative approach to implementation, explore hybrid cloud solutions, management details, involve business and IT teams and use of cloud management software can help reduce potential risks, costs, and flaws in the implementation process. All this will ensure that the benefits of cloud business intelligence will far outweigh the challenges.

Knowledge Credits: www.datapine.com, Rightscale Report 2018

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