Challenges & Countermeasures in Cloud Computing

In IT, the biggest transformations are around the disruptive emergence of the cloud services model — a model that is both market expanding and challenging. The cloud-driven transformation of the IT market is necessitating the restructuring of vendors' offerings, market footprints, and business models. It is also driving organizations to become leaner, meaner and more efficient

Cloud computing challenges have always been there. Companies are increasingly aware of the business value that cloud computing brings and are taking steps towards transition to the cloud. A smooth transition entails a thorough understanding of the benefits as well as challenges involved. Like any new technology, the adoption of cloud computing is not free from issues. Some of the most important challenges are as follows. 

 Major Challenges & Countermeasures in Cloud Computing 

• Critical business data at Risk: Undoubtedly the chief concern firms have with the cloud is the overall security of their data. Putting information into services that are accessible over the public internet is perceived to have a potential gold mine of targets.
• Countermeasures: A cloud service provider can mitigate these risks by establishing an effective security and controls framework (appendix D) in the following areas:
• Identity and Risk Management
• Compliance and Audit
• Application Security
• Data backup and recovery
• Legal
• Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock-in is perceived as a significant challenge to the adoption of cloud computing.
• Countermeasures: Vendors can currently mitigate this concern by making their services more transparent so that customers can understand how their resources are being managed. In the long term, as the ecosystem matures and the industry adopts open standards to facilitate interoperability, this concern will likely be mitigated.
• Prohibiting rogue users from accessing Cloud services: IaaS focuses on managing virtual machines, and the risks are little different than with other cloud types -- here, the main risk is rogue or unwarranted commandeering of services.
• Countermeasures: IaaS requires governance and usage monitoring, it is recommended that enterprises establish cloud service governance frameworks that help prevent employees accessing information or services they are not permitted to use.
• Data Migration issues: The technical issues could be complex. Most firms that migrate to the cloud do so in a hybrid model, keeping certain key elements of their infrastructure in-house and under their direct control, while outsourcing less sensitive or core components. Integrating internal and external infrastructures can be a technical nightmare.

• Countermeasures: Moving, syncing, masking and optimally managing terabytes of data in the cloud requires innovation and new technology.  The technology that enables moving data seamlessly and easily to the cloud. The technology that can address all these issues is called data virtualization software. Data virtualization software at its core is a technology that leverages thin cloning along with compression and change tracking.  By tracking the changes to all data blocks on a storage system and sharing any duplicate data blocks between data copies, data virtualization enables copies of data to be made almost instantly because there is no copying of data.

• Performance and Bandwidth Cost: Businesses can save money on hardware but they have to spend more for the bandwidth. This can be a low cost for smaller applications but can be significantly high for the data-intensive applications. Delivering intensive and complex data over the network requires sufficient bandwidth. This, works as a deterrent for many who are planning to embark their journey on to Cloud.
• As companies look for way to optimize their networks to work with cloud platforms, a few strategies come to the forefront, including:
• WAN Optimization: WAN optimization, or WAN acceleration, is really a collection of techniques designed to manage your network traffic by reducing inefficiencies and redundancies in your traffic, thus reducing your overall traffic demands. 
• Broadband bonding - By utilizing broadband bonding, one can combine several broadband and Internet connections into a single, unified connection that provides scalability and fault tolerance.
• WAN traffic management - WAN traffic management utilizes techniques such as traffic shaping and traffic monitoring to identify and prioritize critical traffic, increasing the efficiency of your network.

Interest In cloud computing has been spurred by a confluence of changes in the business and information technology landscape. Today, it is generally viewed as a potentially attractive new form of low cost IT outsourcing, and cloud technology providers and users are focused on tackling the many limitations and challenges of cloud computing, especially in serving enterprise scale needs. Looking ahead, it is expected that a series of significant disruptions that will be catalyzed by the evolution of cloud computing will be seen. As a result, all businesses would be well advised to begin to develop experience with cloud computing platforms at an early stage to better prepare themselves for the disruptions that lie ahead.