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Top Challenges For Cloud Service Providers
There is no about the fact that there are huge and a number of benefits of cloud computing for businesses of all sizes operating in several different sectors and industries. However, all these advantages must not be taken for granted as they are underpinned by various different kinds of difficulties, obstacles, challenges, and problems that cloud service providers face. Cloud technologies have been getting highly popular in the market and have been trending at a large scale for quite a few years now. Defined in simple terms, cloud computing is an organization or an individual shifting their on-premises processes and computing to the internet.
The first and foremost benefit of migrating to the cloud is that it saves money as well as time. People, as well as enterprises across the world, are able to access a huge pool of different high-utility tools and resources that are open. These resources include but are not limited to computer networks, data, servers, services, and applications. The access to these tools is made possible and bridged by either a 3rd-party server or a cloud that is privately owned. What it does is that it reduces and mitigates instances of inconsistency in further updates as well as enhances the ways in which data is accessed.
What is more is that cloud computing offers businesses flexibility, enhanced synchronization, communication, and collaboration between employees of an organization, better and more storage of data and information, and better data security. Operating on the cloud through private clouds as well as cloud service providers allows corporations to improve and increase their ability to grow, scale, and expand by making better and more well-informed decisions. When we take a look at the beneficial side of cloud computing implementation and cloud technologies adoption, we see that businesses across all verticals rapidly and swiftly move towards a more successful bottom line. This is the reason why the corporate world has been witnessing a movement in huge volumes toward cloud adoption.
It is estimated that more than 90% of all business firms across the globe will be leveraging cloud computing services by the end of the year 2022. However, despite all the potential, development, and offerings of the cloud, there are quite a few issues and obstacles that tend to hinder the smooth operations of cloud service providers. In this article, we will take a look at each of the challenges that cloud businesses face and that need to be mitigated in order to be able to utilize the capability of the cloud in an optimal manner. So let us dive straight into the list of challenges.
Challenges That Cloud Service Providers Are Faced With
A number of surveys and research have been conducted on cloud trends, and there are a number of cloud issues that surface extremely common across the findings of almost all of them. To answer the question, we have listed and expanded upon a number of findings from such studies, as well as detailed additional problems pertaining to cloud computing and cloud technologies that cloud service providers need to address on a regular basis.
To summarize, here are the biggest and most common issues that cloud service providers face:
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Security Issues
One of the most common concerns, if not the most, cited by respondents of surveys related to cloud technologies and cloud computing is security risks. It is interesting to note that the issue took over the challenge of lack of expertise and resources to claim the number one obstacle for cloud service providers. This is due to the rapidly rising cyberthreat landscape and advancements in expertise, and the provision of more resources pertaining to the cloud. A major issue that makes client businesses reluctant to fully adopt cloud computing is the inability to see the precise location at which their data gets stored and processed. This fuels the risks of cloud computing that can formulate during cloud management and implementation.
Another element that is not helping the cause either is the increasing number of headlines highlighting incidents related to account hijacking, hacked APIs and interfaces, broken authentication, compromised credentials, data breaches, etc. An increase in such cases and unfortunate happenings makes it even more difficult and hard to stomach for organizations and businesses across all verticals to hand over their proprietary, confidential, and sensitive financial, employee, and customer data to cloud service providers. Fortunately, though, cloud technologies and cloud computing have been witnessing rapid and constant improvements in their mature security capabilities.
Businesses need to make sure that the one they choose from all the cloud service providers out there has secure access control, authentication, and identity management systems and mechanisms in place to make sure that the security and privacy of their organizations remain intact. Furthermore, corporations also need to check which database security and privacy laws the cloud service provider adhere to. One of the best cloud service providers that have highly secure and up-to-the-minute updated and advanced access control, authentication, and identity management protocols and mechanisms in place is Cloud Computing Technologies. CCT is compliant with all the local as well as international regulations and standards out there and is a technology giant that has a huge number of successful government and federal agency-level projects in its portfolio. The enterprise not only enables businesses and organizations of all sizes and operating across all sectors and industries to easily and efficiently migrate to the cloud but helps them reap the maximum benefits that the cloud technologies have to offer.
Cloud Computing Technologies analyzes and evaluates its client businesses carefully and thoroughly to gain deep insights and deeply understand their operations and IT systems and processes. CCT then tailor-crafts and devises, and develops strategies and technological plans that are customized to the exact requirements and needs of the businesses to enhance their abilities regarding boosting their productivity and operability. This renders the IT systems and technology capabilities of a business highly proficient and able to drive the organization towards a future-proof architecture. The profitability of the business gets increased, and costs are significantly reduced. To take your business’s capabilities and productivity to new, unprecedented heights and to enable it to extract optimal benefits from the cloud and its resources and tools, get in touch with Cloud Computing Technologies today.
It is critical for all businesses and organizations to stay fully compliant with the standards and regulations that are relevant to them, regardless of where their data is stored. Corporations also need to make sure that the cloud service provider’s data recovery policies are strict and robust, another aspect that CCT is unparalleled at.
Password Security
Regardless of the size of the organization, cloud computing security risks are a reality that they all face in this day and age. There are a number of tools within the cloud that can be utilized to ensure security measures that are proper and protective to a great extent. However, the cloud is still not completely secure, especially if your cloud account is accessed by a larger number of users. The vulnerability of a cloud account gets enhanced by someone knowing hacks into it or its password as they are able to access all the sensitive information stored within it. Something that can mitigate the risk of that happening is the use of multiple-level authentication. This is something that only a few cloud service providers, including Cloud Computing Technologies, offer right now.
Furthermore, organizations should make sure that their password remains protected at all times. Businesses should also ensure a frequent change of passwords and need to be considerate and especially careful at times when an employee leaves the corporation or resigns. The rights of access to passwords as well as usernames should be given in a judicious manner.
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Unformed Technology
Most of the services related to cloud computing are at the technologies’ leading edge. These technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), augmented reality, virtual reality, big data analytics, and more. Although all of these technologies are extremely interesting and promising, they are still in their stages of development. When organizations and businesses avail these with levels of dependability that are higher than the capabilities of these modern technologies, cloud services sometimes present a possible backlog that is failing to fulfill the expectations that corporations associate with them in terms of functionality and usability. However, even though this issue can only be completely remediated when these technologies fully mature, requiring businesses to lower their expectations, some cloud service providers, like CCT, tackle this challenge by boosting their services and coming up with and creating unique solutions for each specific lagging.
Cloud Integration
Another issue that a number of organizations, especially the ones that opt for cloud environments that are hybrid, is the lack of synchronization between their public cloud along with the services they use within it and the tools and apps they leverage on-premise. A survey indicates that 62% of businesses think that the major challenge they are faced with in a multi-cloud environment is that of legacy system integration, while 39% of organizations term this issue as the biggest in overall cloud utilization. While most of the other issues that are a part of this list are likely to get withered away with time, this particular problem does not seem to go anywhere soon. This is so as an ideal combination of legacy systems and applications that are based on the cloud requires time, expertise, and resources. However, companies are quickly and widely getting to realize that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh its backlogs by a huge magnitude.
Segmented Adoption and Usage
The root cause of the issue of segmented adoption and usage is the organizations’ lack of planning and strategy at the time of adoption of the cloud. When businesses started moving to the cloud, they did not have a robust plan in place for the endeavor, and improper and ad-hoc strategies caused them long-lasting damage. Some of the components that fueled all this include:
- Individual development teams leveraging the public cloud for specific projects or applications.
- Staggered expiration of the equipment and contracts of data centers.
- The speed of cloud adoption.
- Poor assistance or support by inexperienced and inefficient cloud service providers.
These bootstrap environments and factors resulted in full maturation and integration problems, including but not limited to:
- Lack of sharing of learning as well as resources between teams.
- Security configurations that were ad-hoc and improper.
- Lack of shared standards across cloud projects that were isolated.
As a matter of fact, a large number of research pieces, as well as surveys conducted in recent times, indicate that there are very few companies that believe that their cloud strategies are fully and efficiently optimized. However, strategies of cloud computing, adoption, and usage of it can be rendered in line through some heavy lifting on the part of organizations and businesses, effective control policies, strong governance, and centralized IT. An experienced and expert cloud enterprise, like Cloud Computing Technologies, can help a business remediate its past mistakes and render its cloud strategy efficient and effective.
When it comes to proper usage of the cloud, most decision-makers across industries believe that their IT teams are not as prepared to address the challenges that the cloud computing industry poses as they want them to be. They also think that much improvement is needed in the ways their IT workforce currently goes about managing their cloud-based resources. Looking at the speed with which companies and organizations are moving towards the cloud, it is of utmost importance that either their IT personnel keep up with the adoption to utilize the cloud in an adequate and proper manner and are capable of addressing the potential issues or the corporations have specialized IT, teams, like those of CCT, on their side.
Building a Private Cloud
Even though not many businesses prefer to build a private cloud, those who do opt for the solution often need to face it back as a major challenge. If a private cloud is one of the top priorities for a business, it needs to address it carefully. One of the biggest advantages that businesses and organizations that build a private or internal cloud enjoy are that they can have all their data in-house. However, a challenge that comes along with it is that the IT teams then need to glue together, build, and manage all of it by themselves. This often poses high levels of difficulty due to the lack of experience of the IT managers and departments as well as their lack of expertise in the area.
In order to make sure that the operations of the cloud run smoothly and without facing hiccups, it is important to keep the following steps in mind:
- Designing, creating, and implementing a management system for the inventory in order to automate as many operations and tasks as possible. This also diminishes the chances of human errors and speeds up and regulates a number of processes and business activities.
- Make sure that each task and operation is executed and carried out in the right order through orchestration.
The cloud software layer needs to perform a number of tasks to ensure operational efficiency. These tasks include grabbing an IP address, setting up a VLAN or virtual area local network, putting the server into the queue for load balancing, putting it into the firewall rule that is allocated to the IP address, loading the correct RHEL version, placing the server in the queue for daily backup, and patching the software of the server whenever required. While it is true that it is not easy to develop and manage a private cloud, there are a number of organizations that are able to reap amazing benefits out of it with the support of top-of-the-shelf technology giants, like CCT, that help them plan and manage a private cloud in a swift and efficient manner. Remember, not all cloud service providers are created equal, and while the challenges each of them faces are the same, the key lies in the way they take on, tackle, and handle them to mitigate the threats associated with those challenges.
Management of Multiple Clouds
Cloud service providers not only face challenges that are concentrated in and limited to a single cloud. The last few years have witnessed an exponential rise in the use of multi-cloud. Organizations and businesses have been preferring to combine private and public clouds as well as making shifts towards multi-public cloud and multi-private cloud environments. On average, businesses have been using an average of five clouds in the current day and age, but the number is evidently going to rise quickly and significantly.
Lack of Expertise and Resources
One of the major issues that corporations and businesses face today is a lack of expertise and resources. As mentioned earlier, the volume of workloads that organizations have been placing on the cloud and the dependency they have been putting on it in the recent few years is rising rapidly. These factors are making it more and more difficult for cloud service providers to keep up with the organization’s pace and requirement of tools and resources. What is more, is that they need and demand for proficiency and expertise also continue to expand and grow.
The biggest way to minimize and mitigate this issue is additional and efficient training of development and IT staff. Companies can leverage the services of giant cloud service providers, like Cloud Computing Technologies, with huge pools of specialized staff and CIOs that champion cloud migration as well as management. Most organizations and businesses, small and large-scale alike, do not have the knowledge and expertise required by IT teams to leverage the cloud in an efficient and effective manner.
Similarly, the services of most of the cloud service providers are also taking a hit due to the lack of availability of cloud experts and specialists in the market. SMEs can automate a number of their processes to mitigate the need for large IT teams. For instance, a highly effective DevOps tool, Chef and Puppet, can offer a performance of operations, such as automating backups at times that you predefine and monitoring of resources’ usage patterns, etc. Tools like these and expertise in the domain help optimize the cloud for a number of business aspects, like security, governance, and cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
A Microservice is the breaking up of traditionally tightly coupled application components into small specialized services that communicate through HTTPS REST and HTTPS API interfaces.
Since Microservices are small specialized services, they can be quickly and efficiently rearranged to accommodate future capabilities unknown at the present time.
Microservices are independent and modular which allows for significant flexibility in communications patterns and often prevent cascading failure.
DevOps is the combination of development and operations into a single function of software development and infrastructure management. The main priority of DevOps is the reduction of barriers to speed of delivery.
DevSecOps empowers everyone in the development process using a security focused tool set to address timely security decisions at speed and scale of each development stage. The main priority of DevSecOps is risk reduction through DevOps security accountability and governance.
Security automation in DevSecOps increases speed of code releases while reducing the risk using static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and code dependency checking.
High business value is realized from quick and efficient response to market opportunities and challenges, optimization for innovation, and reduction of technical debt all lead to superior competitive advantage.
CCT is pleased to discuss your requirements and present a proposal for your review and consideration. Call us today at 1-800-804-9726 x105.
Cost Management and Containment
Another challenge that cloud service providers face is the reluctance of businesses to adopt cloud computing and hindered interest in cloud technologies due to the costs associated with them. However, when you look at this aspect in detail, you find that cost is not a problem at all with the cloud as businesses do not need to make huge investments in the technology, unlike procurement and adoption of other technologies, as the cloud allows organizations to slowly ramp up and even scale down their processing capabilities according to their needs through the employment of pay-as-you-go pricing models.
As a matter of fact, cloud adoption and usage saves businesses huge sums of money and helps them increase their revenues. Still, the scalable and on-demand nature of services and technologies associated with the cloud can sometimes make it difficult for businesses and organizations to predict and define costs and quantities, which is something that corporations do not like. There are a number of ways through which costs related to the cloud can be kept in check. These include efficient management reporting to keep the practice on the course, automation of policies for governance, and cost optimization through the conduction of financial reporting and analytics in a better manner.
Migration, Performance, and Compliance
The process of shifting an application or system to the cloud has surfaced as one of the major challenges for cloud computing. Moving a new application onto the cloud is simple, and even an organization’s internal IT teams can easily do it. However, something that challenges even most cloud service providers is transferring an existing application to the cloud. A recent study indicates that more than half of the businesses that are currently in the process of migration are finding the endeavor harder than they expected. This is only because their respective cloud service providers are not competent enough to help them tackle the project in a swift manner.
Some of the challenges that businesses and organizations face during cloud data storage include:
- Application downtime
- Cutover complexity
- Migration agents
- Slow data migrations
- Security issues
- Extensive troubleshooting
Another big challenge for cloud service providers is that the performance of the organizations that are tied with them becomes dependent on their own performance. It is true that cloud service providers provide businesses with an opportunity to access innovative, utility-providing, and advanced technologies that organizations would otherwise not be able to leverage. But the performance of some cloud service providers is not up to the mark, causing a number of major problems for businesses associated with them.
Outages for many cloud players’ services are not uncommon. The key is to look for and partner with a service, such as CCT that has efficient and effective processes and systems in place to mitigate the occurrence of such issues. Similarly, the service should be able to offer you access to data stored on your cloud in real-time so that your business can benefit from up-to-the-minute informed decisions.
When it comes to compliance, cloud storage, as well as backup services from inefficient enterprises, can be a big problem. Whether it is PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, or any other laws or regulations, companies need to make sure that it stays compliant while moving data from their internal storage to the cloud. Not respecting these standards or failing to carry them out can be hugely problematic for businesses. Cloud Computing Technologies are regulated by all the standards and fully compliant with all the regulations across all industries.
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The complexity of the Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud environment, for all businesses and organizations that decide to opt for it, can be a highly complex and complicated mixture of public and private clouds, as well as multiple cloud service providers and several cloud application development vendors operating at the same time. These messy cloud ecosystems find it extremely difficult to extract analytical, consistent data and common user interface benefits of the cloud. In a hybrid cloud environment that is not expertly managed to render it smooth and simple, all the other challenges and issues mentioned in this list, as well as disaster recovery and scalability, magnify in a significant manner.
High Availability and Reliability
Reliability and high availability are one of the most pressing problems pertaining to cloud computing. In the landscape of cloud service providers, reliability refers to the chances of a system being functional at the top of its potential at a given point in time. Many cloud service providers are still not able to provide around-the-clock service, giving way for outages and downtime to frequently occur. And as organizations are becoming more and more reliant on third-party cloud service providers, they need to be extremely robust and dependable. Therefore, businesses need to leverage third-party or internal tools in order to monitor the performance, robustness, usage, and SLAs of these services.
Portability and Interoperability
The current complexity of moving applications from one cloud provider to another is a big issue for most cloud service providers, resulting in organizations and businesses that are partnered with them facing problems. This lack of flexibility, establishing a network from the start that is secure, and complex management of the movement of data are factors that need to be remedied.
In the end, the Cloud Still Wins
Cloud computing and cloud technologies have revolutionized and transformed the IT industry for good. It is one of the best examples of a solution that is full-tech and encourages the growth of innovation across all sectors and industries. It serves as a prime anchor technology and induces reorganization of the business intelligence landscape and many other areas in an efficient manner.
Even though there are challenges for not just cloud service providers, but organizations and businesses that leverage the cloud as well, proper management and innovative systems and processes can easily mitigate them. The key lies in addressing and resolving these issues in a correct manner, something that Cloud Computing Technologies does magnificently. Enterprises need to perform due diligence before choosing a vendor to manage their cloud migration, cloud adoption, cloud computing, cloud technologies, and cloud services.
By keeping your IT roadmap on-premise, your organization or business loses out on a huge number of extremely advantageous benefits that the cloud has to offer. There are not many partnerships that are better than the one that cloud and business intelligence (BI) have, as the latter makes sure that the right information reaches the right people, and the former is a quick and effective way to access and leverage business intelligence applications. Organizations need to make sure they select one of the best cloud service providers, invest in a CIO, involve IT and business teams, explore solutions that hybrid and multi-cloud offer, and approach implementation in an iterative strategic manner in order to overcome these issues and make the best out of the cloud.
Cloud Computing Technologies is an authorized AWS partner and a technology giant that has devised innovative systems to remediate and mitigate all the issues and challenges mentioned in this article. To benefit from cloud technology and the services it offers in the best possible manner and without any drawbacks or challenges, get in touch with CCT today.
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