Question

In his December 6, 2010 article in Datamation titled The Five E's of Cloud Computing Management in 2011, Jeffrey Kaplan states:

"The beauty of today's Cloud Computing solutions is that corporate executives and end-users can more easily critique their functional capabilities and user-friendliness before selecting one to address their needs. However, business decision-makers still need plenty of IT help looking "under the hood" at how these offerings are architected, delivered and supported to ensure they can integrate with existing systems and fulfill their promises. IT managers and CIOs should put selection criteria, procurement procedures and governance policies in place to oversee the evaluation and contracting processes." (Available here.)

When considering cloud computing, Kaplan says "corporate executives and end-users can more easily critique their functional capabilities and user-friendliness." What are the implications of this for planning IT acquisition projects? How much change do you see, if any, in solution selection criteria, procurement procedures, and governance approaches because of cloud computing, assuming the organization has established these earlier based on best practices?

Answer 1

Introduction
Cloud computing is the trending technology that companies decided to implement to grow in the market and achieve new business heights. In number of ways, we can see this new technology as an innovation.T0068e investment in the real physical infrastructure in the business is much larger than the investment in the cloud. According to the statists portal, the total number of cloud-based users are approaching 3.4 billion, which is about half of the total population of the world . This statistical data clearly shows that the cloud computing technology is expanding exponentially, and it will soon dominate the information technology market. Because of the tremendous growth of this technology, every type of business should be well aware of the wave which is largely shaking the whole industry.Cloud computing always has a great impact on the company. This technology not only impacts its global performances but also its internal organization especially IT sector. This technology is enhancing the usual methods of backing up of data. Cloud computing is bringing new methods and tools for the company that is using it.

Aim of present study is to highlight the positive impacts of cloud technology on business. The companies are facing some challenges and
security issues during migration to this technology and there is a need to identify and discuss those challenges to have better planning and policy to overcome those issues.

Positive impacts of cloud computing on business organization

Cloud computing have positive impact on the business organizations as it increases their revenue and helps them to achieve the business goals. Companies prefer to use the services offered by the cloud rather than building their own infrastructure. Following are the benefits of cloud computing technology which motivates the business organizations to migrate from local infrastructure to cloud (Figure 1).

Reduced cost: Cloud computing reduces the expenses of the company as the resources are only acquired when needed and only paid for when used as the billing model works as per usage and there is no up-front cost. The infrastructure is not purchased and thus lowering the initial expenses and maintenance cost as well. The clients are not the owners of the infrastructure but can use the cloud services online.
Unlimited scalability: This is the major benefit of cloud technology as the client has the flexibility to scale up or scale down as per theneeds of the organization. The companies do not need to worry about the future demands as they can easily acquire the additional services anytime. Also, if a business grows over time, the cloud can scale effortlessly to meet theincreased demand over time.
Flexibility: Cloud computing provides lot of flexibility to its clients. There is an easy testing and deployment of the services over cloud.
The customers are free to decide which services they need and pay for accordingly. The cloud services can better meet the changing business
demands by providing various services. If any application provided by the cloud is not getting our job done, we have the flexibility to switch
to another cloud.
Better mobility: The users of the cloud can access the services of the cloud anytime anywhere from a variety of devices. Whenever they have the working internet connection, they can login and use the services. This benefit of cloud computing provides a flexible work culture to the employees and they can perform their duties from anywhere without the need to be physically present at the business headquarter.
Improved communication: Cloud computing improves communication and collaboration among employees by having access to instant messaging, conferencing and video conferencing options. They can jointly work on documents and projects ensuring higher cohesion and team work. This is possible because of data centralization and updation of cloud servers in real time.
Reliability: As the services of cloud is available all the time and can be accessed anywhere. Also, the backup and recovery management make this technology more reliable.
Increased storage: Some cloud providers offer the Storage as service to its customers.Companies can store lot more data on cloudthan their local devices. If business grows and demands more storage, companies effortlessly scale up and get more storage from the cloud provider.
Easier upgrades: It is the responsibility of the cloud providers to upgrade the infrastructure and services for their customers. The new business trends and solutions are made available to the clients by cloud providers to compete in the business market by adopting latest technologies. The cloud providers maintain the system by doing different software and security updates.
Disaster recovery: Companies using cloud services need not to frame the complex disaster or failure recovery plans as the service providers take care of such issues and put the clients out of the trouble in a fast manner.
Security: The most important factor while choosing a cloud provider is the security and privacy they provide to our data. This is the
main reason that these providers invest large amount on their services and infrastructure to offer better security.

Open challenges in cloud migration
When a company decides to migrate to cloud, it needs them to migrate their applications, sensitive data and other business elements
from local devices to the cloud provider’s site. The different challenges faced by the companies are (Figure 2).
Interoperability: Interoperability is the one of the big challenges in cloud migration. This is concerned with the ability of devices to communicate to each other. In cloud community technology, it means the ability to develop the code which works with number of cloud service providers simultaneously irrespective of the differences between the cloud providers. So, if we migrate the business to the cloud and want to be part of cloud environment, then it should be compatible with more than one service provider.

Cloud security and privacy: Security of the cloud is the biggest threat in the current market. When we decide to adopt the cloud technology, we are migrating business sensitive information to the
cloud servers and then there is less control over the data. It is then the responsibility of the cloud provider to ensure the data security and privacy. As the cloud services are accessed through internet, there is risk of attack by the hackers to steal in andcausethedamage.Itis,therefore, necessary to carefully choose the cloud provider and verify the methods and tools that are being used by the cloud to ensure the security and
privacy to our data. Company should ensure some regulations and agreement with the cloud provider to enforce the data security.
Sensitive data: When these organizations adopt cloud computing, they need to migrate their sensitive data to cloud and if this data leaks,
this causes big damage to the business. So, the migration of sensitive data to cloud is a big challenge and it needs great skills to handle and
manage things.
Portability: Portability is the challenge in cloud computing which means that the applications should migrate easily from one cloud to
another cloud. The software that we wish to move should be potable with the other cloud environment. This portability is difficult to achieve as the cloud providers use different standard languages for their respective platforms.
Vendor lock-in: It is a major barrier for most of the companies to migrate to cloud computing because of the lack of standardization. In
vendor lock-in, customer wants to switch the vendor are bound to pay for changing the vendor. Vendor Lock-in is noticed in every technology
till now despite number of efforts like open system and platform independent language.
Organizational aspects: The business organization adopting the cloud technology will undergo lot of changes in the internal working,
mission, funding and staff etc. As the business is moving to the cloud, there will be new challenges for administration and the operational
staff. There will be new security and privacy challenges as the data is stored on remote server. The employee of the company should be happy and confident of the new technology to explore the advantages and overcome the issues. The overall organizational setup will change and the employees at different levels should welcome this positive impact to
achieve the new business heights.
Regulatory and laws restrictions: Before migrating to cloud, the business organization needs to keep in mind the different legal and
regulatory issues. These laws ensure the commitment and responsibility of both clients and tenants. In few countries of the Europe, Government regulations cannot allow the personal data of customers or other
sensitive information to be physically store outside country. The need to build exclusive centers may not be feasible for the cloud providers and may prove a big challenge for them. If sensitive data is not protected
and some leakage occurs, then the defined laws and regulations will decide who is responsible for the fault and how to compensate.

Solutions to overcome these challenges
Despite number of benefits of cloud computing, there is low migration rate because of different challenges faced by the companies. Following are some solutions that a company should follow to overcome the challenges of cloud migration.

Use encryption technique: The best way to avoid data from snooping while sharing between business network and cloud devices is
to encrypt it. The data is always transferred from local server to cloudserver in an encrypted format so that even if it is hacked appears as
trash to them.
Alternate backups: Companies should keep regular backups at their local storage devices or at the alternate cloud provider. There are
so many cloud providers that are offering storage as a service to their clients.
Hiring skilled and experienced cloud professionals: As the companies are migrating their business to the cloud, there should be a team of skilled cloud professionals who know how to handle this technology efficiently. Hiring such team is foremost thing for a company who has sound knowledge about the technology and the standards used
in technology.
Use the services of Security Service Providers: There are number of clouds provides in the market that is providing security as a service
to their clients and company should use these services to ensure the security and privacy to their data.
Invest in education: Companies should educate their employees towards the goals of new technology in order to help learners to cope
with the new adopted technology. Once the users get enough knowledge regarding positive impacts of the technology, they can render their full cooperation to make it a success in all respects.
Proper cloud provider selection: There are number of cloud service providers in the market who are competing and the company should
select a service provider after proper investigation of the track record of the provider. Organization should verify the tools and techniques used by the cloud provider and choose the best one to meet their business
requirement. Before migrating data to the cloud, the company should ask number of questions to the cloud provider regarding security and
privacy measures taken, firewall setup, antivirus, testing methods etc. to ensure the data security and privacy threat in future.
Cloud auditor to audit the services: Third party control or organizations should be there to audit the cloud services and other performance including security. The Cloud Auditor should create an audit plan that includes policies and procedures as a reference guide.
Selective migration of business applications: Company should first decide that which applications they need to migrate to cloud and
which ones to keep on local devices. Before migration, they need to verify whether the application is finance based, is it customer data or
business data because all the applications may not be cloud compatible.