Cloud Computing: Is It Really the Solution We Need?

Cloud computing has been under much discussion in the news lately, but not necessarily in favorable terms. First off, Amazon’s AWS service halted during early summer, and then GoDaddy’s hosting services were apparently ceased by the folks at Anonymous. The hosting company, however, has denied all such claims. This points towards the fact that the cloud is unreliable and cannot be trusted.

Nonetheless, incidents such as these support my – and many other people’s – arguments that the cloud cannot be fully trusted. In fact, it cannot be trusted any more than you can trust an authoritative figure, which makes sense considering the fact that a few Google outages have been attributed to human errors and faults.

One should never trust something implicitly so much so that important decisions are based on trust alone, and no other factor is taken into account. Cloud may have numerous advantages over other services, but the most important thing is that it requires consistent bandwidth (which is often not possible), ease of administration and effective cost management. These factors do not come with a guarantee or an assurance, and one cannot blame anyone else when things do not go as planned.

No service is perfect and free from all known faults. One would be naïve to expect that a service would deliver flawlessly in all situations. Decisions about where to position technology for ideal results (known as Architectural decisions) are based on the assumption that perfection is not guaranteed in any case. The best that may possibly be done is incorporation of a disaster-recovery system or one that would prevent system failure in the first place in order to back the service in question if it cannot be fully trusted.

All those people who claim that cloud is the solution to all our problems without comparing it with other alternatives are without doubt those individuals – or marketing executives – who are paid to highlight the benefits of cloud. Surely, cloud has a number of advantages over other options; however the flaws cannot be ignored altogether. And this is exactly what these people do: they out rightly reject any counter arguments for cloud. The point is that one should keep in mind both the benefits and defects of cloud, and hence proceed accordingly.

Before making a decision, you should consider going through reviews of different services – what is working and what is failing – and keep a tab on what is in and what is not. This way, companies would better be able to incorporate cloud services into their existing infrastructure, which – even if it cannot eliminate certain imperfections and limitations – would help them to ideally meet their requirements at minimum costs.