Question

An established financial company is about to launch their new banking application. Give 5 reasons why the company should use their own data centre rather than cloud computing.

Answer 1

There are many reasons why cloud computing can be a bad choice when developing an application. Lets us first look at what is cloud computing and then state the reasons why the company needs to use its own data center.

Cloud computing can be described as a service that allocates computer resources and data storage to users on demand on the cloud (meaning a chunk of the services Operating system resources and data storage is allocated to the user). The resources on the cloud can be remotely operated and help in implementing functionalities without configuring.

The reasons why cloud computing can be a bad choice are:

(1)

Cloud computing can prove costly as the application scales. Usually, a cloud computing service like GCP or AWS allocates resources to the user based on computing power and size of the database. As the company's application scales(means grow bigger) it would have to use more and more CPU and database to cater to the increased demand and this can prove costly in the long run.

(2)

Cloud computing does not provide customized modeling of a database or a system. The company will have to use what the service provides. If the company wishes to tweak a database according to its needs, the service might eventually resist to the change and cause malfunction whereas in a data center one can model it in the way the company wants.

(3)

The company might require trained professionals to manage and maintain the cloud computing service. While cloud computing is relatively easy to set up but it requires skills to host, deploy, and manage an application on the cloud. The databases have to handled skillfully to avoid any loss of data.

(4)

Sometimes the application can experience downtime on the Internet due to excessive traffic in the cloud computing service. This can be due to non-effective load balancers in the service or a malfunction in the service's core system. Nevertheless, if the company's application is a big venture, a slight downtime can cause a loss of millions.

(5)

The more obvious reason that a cloud computing service can be a bad choice is security. If the company does not handle the SSL certificates, user access and bucket access in the cloud computing services there are increased chances of security breaches. A company's main asset is its data and cloud computing is not probably the best way to handle security due to third party accesses.

These are some of the reasons why data centers should be preferred over cloud computing but as this answer takes only the bad side into perspective, cloud computing comes off as inefficient and troublesome which is actually not the case.