Get Your Head Out of The Cloud

During the past few years, “The Cloud” has become an incredibly powerful buzzword for IT companies and MSPs. Unfortunately, it isn’t uncommon for these companies to sell business professionals on Cloud Computing without the decision-maker fully understanding the capabilities and limitations of the cloud.  Having this knowledge is crucial to deciding whether the cloud is a good fit for your business or not. In our experience, we have seen situations on both sides of the spectrum; we can confidently say that there is no “one size fits all” option when it comes to data storage. Before you throw out all your servers and desktop software, here are some things to consider:

  1. Dependency
    1. Cloud computing relies on your connection to the Internet, so if your Internet is slow or you experience random outages often, the cloud may not be the right solution for your company. Depending on how much you store in the cloud, this could lead to extended downtimes and significantly impact overall productivity. Unfortunately, even the most reliable network connections can fail sometimes. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services experienced a 4-hour outage, which affected hundreds of thousands of websites across the country.
  2. Vulnerability
    1. If you aren’t comfortable with the idea of your data being on the Internet, you might want to think twice. When you store your data on the cloud, that means your data can be accessed by anyone using the Internet anytime. That means something as simple as a phishing email could potentially compromise all your business data. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were more than 900 data breaches in 2016, which exposed more than 35 million sensitive records.
  3. Inflexibility
    1. Ironically, cloud computing apps are incredibly inflexible. It is common for businesses to commit to a vendor only to be “locked in”, making it nearly impossible or costly to migrate to a different vendor. Vendors do this by using proprietary software that is purposefully incompatible with competitors. In addition to this, migrating to a different platform also exposes your data to privacy vulnerabilities in the interim. Blindly entering into a contract with a cloud services provider can have serious consequences, including having your data held hostage.

Despite these daunting pitfalls, it still has considerable potential. At Blue Tier, we offer a hybrid cloud solution, which uses a fusion of on-premises, dedicated IT infrastructure and a combination of one or more public cloud providers. By doing this, companies have more control and freedom over both the public and private components as opposed to using a prepackaged, public cloud platform. From the beginning, our HybridCIO understood the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket. He knew the importance of maintaining control over your data by using a hybrid cloud solution; by building a hybrid cloud with a private IT infrastructure that is directly accessible, it would greatly reduce inactivity in comparison to the public cloud. It would also be able to withstand the average workload of your business.