Five Common Misunderstandings About Cloud Platforms
With all of the new cloud technology out there, it can be hard to find the perfect fit your company; the most important thing to keep in mind when choosing a cloud service provider is this: not all solutions are created equal.
Implementing a cloud platform into your business will do a lot of positive things for your IT staff; most importantly it will free them up from routine maintenance and allow them to focus on more pressing matters.
According to an article written by Lisa M. Schwartz for Forbes, choosing a cloud platform is like choosing a spouse or a business partner; it’s not a decision to be made lightly and could positively or negatively change your business. Here are 5 common misconceptions about cloud platforms:
- All cloud platforms off the same set of services– With the amount of startup and veteran cloud platform vendors the number is always growing. It’s important to look at what each solution provides because most cloud platform providers offer a very limited number of pre-built services and a lot of them are dedicated to only one type of service, such as storage.
- PaaS is a great catchall solution to providing missing capabilities not found in SaaS applications– Sometimes SaaS applications providers will want you to use their legacy cloud platform so they can get away with not improving the functionality of their SaaS apps. Some vendors will even bury cloud platform development services in the monthly fees you would pay for in the SaaS application. Make sure that you are not paying extra for services that should already be bundled into the SaaS application.
- Non-standards-based cloud platforms or open source development languages can bring down cost- This is not always the case. Hiring a programmer of a language that is not as well-known can be much more expensive than hiring a programmer of an industry-standard development language like Java.
- All cloud subscriptions are more or less the same- A lot of cloud providers put complicated restrictions and limitations on how much work customers can demand of the platform for the basic subscription fee. Customers may not be able to scale the platform for quick surges in traffic because it’s an added fee that needs to be negotiated with the provider.
- All clouds are built using the same architecture- Most cloud platforms are built with in a way that makes them cost effective for the vendor to run, not necessarily for the customer and this varies from vendor to vendor. This forces customers to share database and processing power with other customers. The way vendors deal with this, is to cap the amount of processing each customer can do.