Adopting cloud computing solutions isn’t risk-free. The cloud is a relatively recent technology, and businesses have adopted cloud solutions at a furious pace. Digital transformation initiatives have led corporate leaders to find the best digital solutions for their business tasks and workflows, including cloud computing. Cloud computing provides several benefits to both solution providers, IT professionals, and enterprises. However, there are also a bunch of risks to integrating a cloud computing solution into your infrastructure. These risks, obviously, should be avoided at all costs.
Depending on the solution your enterprise uses, the specific cloud computing risks you’ll face will be different. No matter what the risks are, though, your organization needs to know how to deal with them. If they aren’t accounted for, they could become a huge problem for your enterprise. Below, we’ve listed some of the most common cloud computing risks and how your company can avoid or overcome them.
Cloud computing security
Security is still the number one barrier for enterprises looking to integrate the cloud. Proper cloud security involves responsibilities on both the cloud user’s and cloud vendor’s part. Your enterprise need to make sure that your employees are trained on how to safely use a cloud solution before you officially implement it in your infrastructure. However, a cloud vendor also needs to provide security capabilities, such as data encryption and identification policies, in order to keep their cloud environment secure. A vendor’s service-level agreement (SLA) should include a section on what the vendor provides for cloud security, as well as what it expects you to do for securing the cloud.
Compatibility issues
Migrating data to the cloud can be a daunting process, especially if the cloud environment isn’t able to work with it. Cloud environments are becoming more open in order to support a number of data types; however, there are still a lot of restrictions for each cloud deployment in terms of what they’re able to work with. It’s always a good idea to know whether or not the data and file types that your enterprise uses on a daily basis are supported in your cloud environment.
Maintaining privacy in the cloud
Your enterprise’s data is not just critical for business success. You also want to protect that data from users who don’t have the authorization to do so. This could either be to just protect your data or to maintain compliance with data regulations. This might be easy enough to do with on-premise hardware, but when you store data in the cloud, you’re relying on another party to manage the servers it’s stored on. A cloud provider should have policies in place to maintain the privacy of your data to ensure that only your organization can access it.
Cloud multitenancy
Cloud environments operate on a multitenant system, which means that vendors will store data from multiple users on the same server. This helps cloud providers save on resources by utilizing each server to the fullest. It might sound like multitenancy makes it easier for your data to be accessed by other users. However, cloud vendors are aware of the potential issues and have systems in place to partition each user’s cloud resources so that only they may access them.
Running a cloud environment and need help managing the cloud services you use? Our MSP Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top cloud MSP vendors for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying. We also offer an MSP Vendor Map that outlines those vendors in a Venn diagram to make it easy for you to select potential providers.
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Daniel Hein
Dan is a tech writer who writes about Cybersecurity for Solutions Review. He graduated from Fitchburg State University with a Bachelor's in Professional Writing. You can reach him at dhein@solutionsreview.com
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