Eight cloud computing risks, and how to quash them

What could go wrong with cloud? Let’s count the ways….

In their latest book, Cloud Computing for Business, Dr. Chris Harding and his team of co-authors affiliated with The Open Group — a key standards body for enterprise architecture — detail some of the key risk areas that need to be looked at with any cloud project:

Risk #1: The solution may not meet its financial objectives: Do your short-term and long-term ROI work. The key factors to consider when assessing cloud ROI risk probability include utilization, speed, scale, and quality. “These factors are built into most ROI models, and affect the headline figures for investment,
revenue, cost, and time to return.”

Risk # 2: The solution may not work in the context of the user enterprise’s organization and culture: Always a biggie. The best way to address is having “a clear executive vision and direction for business transformation,” which includes top-level executive support. (Easier said than done, right?) This should include the establishment of “a clear roadmap for procurement or implementation of cloud services and applications that use them, and coordination of stakeholders and competing strategies to get consensus for storage, computing, network and applications to avoid islands of demand usage.” Always start with pilots to create confidence and “build buy-in and usage in the user community for cloud services.”

Risk #3: The solution may be difficult to develop due to the difficulty of integrating the cloud services involved: “There is a risk that it will not be possible to integrate [multiple] cloud services with the existing system and with each other. This risk is critical; if the system cannot be built, it cannot be used. The service integration risk can be assessed by considering interface conversion cost, ability to change the existing system, and available skills.” The skills part could stand as a risk on its own, as Harding and his co-authors point out that “significant skills are required to assemble and customize multiple cloud services from different providers in a flexible, adaptable way, while maintaining security, backup, and governance mechanisms.”

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Source: zdnet.com
By: Joe McKendrick