Do you need the cloud? or Do you want the cloud?

Cloud is everywhere now. It is most prominent area in research, IT industry and in academics also. Every presentation or lecture i saw in past highlighted the benefits of cloud computing. Being researcher in this field I decided to know areas where cloud is not best option. To my surprise there are few areas where cloud had an impact. If some organization says, “I want the cloud because everyone has” is not the way to start. In this post i will discuss the areas where cloud can be used and where it should not.

Before going any further lets see Why you need the cloud?:

• All load of IT is handled by Professionals.
• Capital expenditure is very small compared to big investment.
• Time to market for any service is just “now”.
• Flexibility (as you go)
• They always make a offer which you can not refuse.

Above are the benefits all cloud provider determine to provide, but that not the case all the time. Lets see why some of IT industries don’t want Cloud:

• Security: Every organization has very large data and they collected it by spending millions of dollar. Every in 21st century data is actual wealth. So, why an organization will send its data to any third party.
• Uptime: Their is no thing like 99.99 uptime. Many IT organization blames that their cloud providers are shutdown for 3-4 days. This is not because of providers but sometime power grid fails, someone cut the fiber line.
• We are working fine with old methods our IT can handle it.
• Our IT will not able to handle cloud.
• Multiple vender in cloud and no portability and interoperability.

After studying many papers and technical reports i ended at following conclusion.

Business function that suits cloud deployment can be low-priority business applications, for example, business intelligence against very large databases, partner-facing project sites, and low priority services. Cloud favours traditional web applications and interactive application that compromise two or more data sources and services with short life span. Based on above facts we can say that cloud is suitable for applications that are modular and loosely coupled having isolated workloads. Applications that need significantly different level of infrastructure throughout the month, or that have seasonal demands, such as increase in traffic during holiday shopping.

cloud is not suitable for mission critical applications that depends on critical data normally restricted to organization (Private cloud are now a days are used for this purpose to some extend). Applications that run 24*7*365 with steady demand. Cloud doesn't work well with applications that scale vertically on single server.