Cloud computing currently has positive prospects for the global market, but some shortcomings may make it obsolete in the future.
The rise of cloud computing caused a sudden shift from the traditional way companies think about IT assets. This shift caused a rapid increase in the number of organizations adopting cloud computing. Currently, the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $480 billion in 2022 to $1.7 trillion in 2029, growing at a CAGR of 19.9% over the forecast period.
However, despite this positive outlook for the global market, cloud computing has not been enough to handle the new changes in the technology industry. New technological trends such as the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and the growing application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in smart devices and smart homes have made cloud computing increasingly obsolete in many areas, exposing some of its shortcomings.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a computing model in which computing resources such as databases, servers, storage, software, networking, intelligence, and analytics are delivered over the Internet. It is the type of computing where businesses don’t need to have their own data center or computing infrastructure to access or run these computing resources.
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While this form of computing gives companies the flexibility to allocate resources based on their business goals, cloud computing has inherent problems. If you’re considering a cloud migration anytime soon, check out some of these cloud computing drawbacks before taking such a step.
Disadvantages of cloud computing
Occasional downtime
The nature of cloud computing makes it vulnerable to server downtime. During downtime, customers must wait for the connection to be restored before they can access the service. Depending on how long the downtime lasts, this situation can cause critical damage to businesses.
For example, businesses have experienced data outages, loss of customers and revenue due to downtime. A statistic from 2020 questionnaire revealed that 25% of respondents worldwide reported that average hourly downtime costs their business between $301,000 and $400,000. When you multiply this number by the number of times this download occurs in a year, you understand why the center is a critical problem with cloud computing.
A case of how downtime can affect cloud-driven businesses, the 2020 blackout of all Google services that lasted more than an hour, grounding millions of businesses while the outage lasted.
Limited flexibility and control
Cloud computing is performed in a way that deprives business owners of the ability to manage and monitor the entire cloud infrastructure. Because of this situation, companies often have little or no control over their data. In addition, depending on the cloud service provider’s management policy and end-user license agreement, customers may also have restrictions on how they can manage their deployments.
In most cases, when such a policy is in place, customers have limited access to what tool, application, and data they can deploy to the cloud provider’s server.
Compatibility issues with suppliers
Moving from one cloud provider to another in a competitive cloud computing environment has been a major curse for cloud computing. While companies are confident in subscribing to a cloud provider how seamless it will be for them to migrate to other cloud service providers, experience has shown that this is not always the case.
There are compatibility issues as some applications that work well in one cloud platform may not be compatible with another provider. This risk worries many people about migrating their resources to other cloud providers.
Security and Threats
While most cloud providers employ various security measures to keep hackers away from their cloud infrastructure, the number of data breaches indicates that cloud computing is still vulnerable to attacks. This makes storing business-critical files and critical data in virtual data centers a potential risk.
For example Microsoft revealed in 2021 that due to a major flaw in its flagship Azure Cosmos DB database, customer information may have been exposed to hackers, giving hackers access to read, modify, or delete data stored in the cloud. Further, Results A Fugue survey shows that about three in four teams working in a cloud environment experience about ten incidents of potential hacks due to poorly configured cloud systems.
While these threats don’t make cloud computing completely insecure, successful attacks or data breaches are only more likely if there is human error in cloud setup and issues with endpoint configurations.
Latency issues
Cloud latency describes the time it takes for a cloud service operator to respond to a customer’s request. Cloud service latency is a serious problem in cloud computing, especially as the world witnesses an exponential growth in data generation and connected devices.
With more data being generated from these devices, there is potential growth in the incidence of cloud services latency. The time it takes for data to travel to cloud hosting centers for compute processes and back to the client side affects cloud computing. This is why modern IoT devices and smart industries use edge computing as a computing model.
It’s uneconomical
Due to the large amount of data and files stored in the cloud, users need a large amount of bandwidth to constantly access this data.
While many cloud service providers have adapted their payment to the pay-as-you-use model, it still costs a lot to maintain a connection to cloud services. As a result, maintaining this level of bandwidth for continuous access to cloud resources can be capital intensive, and not too many start-ups can afford that.
