“Drawbacks of Cloud Computing
There are five major categories of cons or drawbacks that we see with cloud computing. These are in no particular order:
• Security. Unlike SaaS companies who know exactly what sensitive or personally identifiable information is being entered into their system, cloud providers don’t know and try not to care; but this leaves a potential gap in the security of your data.
• Portability. As simple as clouds are to get up and running on, they can be difficult to move to physical servers or other clouds depending on your application’s implementation.
• Control. Outsourcing your infrastructure is giving a third-party complete control over your application being available or not. Unlike ISPs that can be redundant, redundancy is not easy to accomplish with clouds at this point.
• Limitations. Three limitations that we see in some of the cloud vendors’ offerings are:
1. IP addresses. The early clouds didn’t even offer static IP addresses but most do so now. They still do not allow you to own your IP addresses, which may be important to certain applications or services such as email.
2. Load balancers. Most clouds offer software load balancing, which is a great improvement, but there are limitations between software and hardware load balancing.
3. Certification. Other third-party software vendors do not certify their software to run in a cloud environment. This may cause you issues if you are trying to get support for their software.
• Performance. Even though clouds are sold on computational equivalencies, the actual performance varies significantly between vendors and physical and virtual hardware. You have to test this yourself to see if it matters to your application.
The importance of any of these or how much you should be concerned with them is determined by your particular company’s needs at a particular time.”
—Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
