Debunking Common Cloud Computing Myths

Myth 3: It’s impossible to achieve public cloud security and compliance

The fact is, most security breaches are not the fault of a cloud provider—the majority are on-premise breaches. Cloud computing doesn’t introduce any new or unforeseen vulnerabilities, and can infact provide a unified platform for conducting and verifying compliance audits. Global cloud providers have expertise in (and deep pocket budgets for) security, including continuous monitoring, virus protection, and firewall security.

Myth 4: Moving to the cloud can actually be too costly

Many businesses choose to take an incremental approach to cloud adoption because of concerns about cost. For example, they may first move applications such as email, word processing, or data storage to the cloud before committing larger, business-critical applications to a new platform. Organizations that take this approach via private cloud often see such an impact on the bottom line and productivity that they don’t even consider a public cloud provider. But by leveraging a cloud management platform, organizations can keep public cloud expenses in check. With automation and analytics you can further reduce cloud costs by configuring a power schedule for non-production instances, decommissioning instances when they’re no longer needed, and make use of pre-purchased or Reserved Instances (RIs) to lower your monthly bill.

Myth 5: The cloud requires more IT management

There may be a spike in IT management resources and effort initially, as organizations migrate applications to the cloud. However, once that process is completed, the IT team no longer needs to manage the software, hardware and data protection of the migrated applications and the associated data. The reality is that every application that moves to a cloud infrastructure helps IT teams reduce maintenance costs and management overhead. Taking things one step further and implementing self-service automation—allowing users to provision systems themselves on demand— means that your IT team is freed from simple tasks and empowered to focus on more complex, strategic initiatives, while your DevOps teams can quickly benefit from your private and public cloud infrastructure.

While myths around cloud computing continue to prevail, the reality is that organizations that let their concerns slow adoption are already lagging behind the competition. Regardless of which approach you take—private, public or hybrid, each has its own set of integration and management challenges. But the benefits of the cloud—agility, flexibility, and speed—are well on their way from competitive advantage to table stakes, and organizations can no longer afford to ignore them. In order to fully embrace the cloud, organizations must cut through the myths and the hype to identify the cloud strategy that will best support their business.