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Top 3 Reasons Your Company Should Leave the Cloud in 2020
Chelsea Sauder • January 16, 2020
When public cloud computing showed up in earnest around 2012, it promised a fundamental shift in the way corporations build and maintain their information systems.
The landscape of Information/Digital Technology is rapidly changing, and growing businesses are taking notice. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a sole proprietor, the public cloud is shown to be faster, easier to deploy, and fiscally advantageous compared to a traditional infrastructure approach.
While the cloud provides tremendous leverage for businesses of all sizes, it’s far from a silver bullet for all our IT woes. Before setting your sights on a complete cloud migration, beware of the potential pitfalls.
1) Cloud computing is NOT plug and play
A business shouldn’t simply upload their information into the cloud and call it a day, but many organizations have done just that. It’s not only a disservice to your business, but most likely a wasted effort which could be putting your sensitive data at greater risk to malicious threats and actors. If your migration strategy ended after initial data transfer, you should leave the cloud.
Most basic cloud deployments involve using a single server (a virtual machine) to run your software and make it accessible from anywhere in the world. However, a cloud server is still a single machine, just like the computer in your office, and when it stops working properly, your application goes offline.
Being a cloud-based business does not guarantee 100% uptime. Outages will happen and it is up to your IT team to make sure your cloud environment is as resilient as possible.
Cloud computing offers several resilient infrastructure solutions that can minimize your risk of outages and performance, including data replication (maintaining your data in multiple separate locations) and geo-redundant services (distributing servers and data to many locations and serving the user from the available location closest to them). However, these services must be deployed and configured by the user, requiring extensive knowledge and expertise on your cloud environment.
The decentralized approaches mentioned above come with their unique challenges and potential cost increases. To determine the best approach requires expert configuration and maintenance. Before your migration to the cloud, make sure you understand the best approach for your business and the varied costs associated with initial and ongoing expenses.
2) The “Pay as You Go” model can be really expensive
Many businesses who adopted the “lift and shift” strategy with public cloud considered as just another datacenter are now finding that it’s costing significantly more than it would in their own datacenter or colocation space. The financial benefits aren’t anywhere near what was promised. If cost cutting was your main priority, you should leave the cloud.
The bulk of your costs when moving to the cloud come from monthly recurring costs instead of the initial equipment and installation costs required when running your infrastructure on-premise. A common attraction to working in the cloud is the ability to cheaply host your applications on a more sophisticated infrastructure than what could have been afforded in-house.
However, those recurring costs can stack up quickly:
A single cloud virtual machine with 2 CPUs and 8 GB of memory (a minimal amount for most app servers) is over $150/month. For any enterprise storage solution, you’ll pay both for persistent disk (physical media) as well as storage transactions. Then on top of that, you will pay for network IP addressing and traffic. Very quickly, a single virtual machine can cost hundreds of dollars each month.
This is an illustration of cloud costs at the most basic level. The single virtual machine model may be necessary for some legacy applications but is becoming less relevant as the industry moves to a “cloud-native” model. Cloud-native doesn’t necessarily mean a full public cloud migration. In fact, not all workloads are best served by the cloud. Instead, cloud-native means your applications and supporting infrastructure are agile and take advantage of edge computing, private cloud, and hybrid environments. Many businesses would often be better served both operationally and financially by exploring a separate web application service, cloud storage service, and cloud database service, as opposed to deploying those pieces as part of a whole virtual machine. The public cloud gives you lots of building blocks and knobs in the box, but it’s up to you to assemble those pieces and make them all work together to support your computing needs.
Determining the best approach for your business needs makes all the difference when it comes to your cloud performance and overall operational costs.
3) Security, even in the cloud, is still your responsibility
In the early days of cloud, a tenet often heard was “improvement happens even when you’re sleeping – the cloud provider is responsible updates and security.” This holds true for the platform itself, but not for the specific workloads you manage. If you think that using the cloud has outsourced all your cybersecurity concerns, you should leave the cloud.
While the cloud can provide insulation from many traditional cybersecurity concerns, new and exotic vulnerabilities are possible. For example, when assigning permissions to important files in an on-premise system, the alias EVERYONE refers to “all the users within this company’s environment”. With the multi-tenant cloud model there have been a few notable cases were EVERYONE instead referred to “all the users on the entire Internet”. There also have been multiple instances where users have misconfigured permissions for their cloud storage bucket and left valuable company data exposed to those looking to take advantage.
Imagine exposing your entire estate of intellectual property, financial records, and client information to the entire web.
It is important to recognize that when handling sensitive information, due care must always be taken. The data being transferred to, from, and within the cloud is vital to your success and potentially harmful to your business and consumers if left unprotected. In the era of cloud computing, the definition of “due care” has changed and continues to evolve. At the end of the day, the responsibility to keep your system secure is on you – not the cloud services provider.
Clearly, these examples aren’t inherent flaws of migrating to the cloud, and we’re being tongue-in-cheek about leaving it entirely. What we do recommend: companies who are considering a cloud migration – or who have recently migrated without thorough planning – take time to re-evaluate these key points before going all-in.
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The cloud is the future of the computing as we know it. Adoption, migration, and deployment all must be thoughtfully considered to truly take advantage of all the benefits of cloud computing, while maintaining operating costs that make sense for your business.
Knowledge expertise is the strongest resource any business can leverage to protect their vital data and ensure future growth. When making great strides, every business owner has the responsibility to do their due diligence in carving the right path forward. The world of IT and cybersecurity continues to change and evolve, and that responsibility can be daunting.
The experts at TexasPGB can help. We understand that the optimal cloud solution looks different for every business, app, and intended use case. We identify the best platforms, services, and custom integrations to enable your business to fully benefit from cloud efficiencies while maintaining peace of mind. Give us a call, we’re happy to help!
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