2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES

The datapine Blog

News, Insights and Advice for Getting your Data in Shape

6 Cloud Computing Challenges Businesses

Search Blog
Are Facing In These Days
By Mona Lebied in Business Intelligence, Jan 13th 2017 enter search term

FOLLOW DATAPINE

LinkedIn

Recent Posts
Top 10 Business Intelligence Myths
& Misconceptions You Should
Know

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 1/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

Feb 14th 2017

FREE TRIAL
Think your business is too small for BI?
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY We RESOURCES
have busted that myth. Check out the
rest of our top 10 business intelligence
myths. Then learn how to get over them!
read more

11 Steps on Your Roadmap to

Implement a Successful Business
Intelligence Strategy
Feb 9th 2017
Business Intelligence is imperative to a
companys success. To maximize your
organization's BI capabilities make sure
to include these 11 steps in your business
intelligence strategy.
read more

Everywhere you turn these days the cloud is being talked about. This ambiguous term
seems to encompass almost everything about us. While the cloud is just a metaphor Designing Charts and Graphs: How
for the internet, cloud computing is what people are really talking about these days. to Choose the Right Data
Cloud computing is the delivery of hosted services over the internet, through a network Visualization Types
of remote servers. These remote servers are busy storing, managing, and processing Feb 7th 2017
data. Data visualization is drawing a picture
with your data instead of leaving it in a
spreadsheet or table. Technically, any
Exclusive Bonus Content: Download our free cloud computing tips! way you choose to do this counts, but
Check out these 6 challenges and how to face them. there are some charts that are way better
at telling a story.

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 2/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

The capabilities and breadth of cloud computing are enormous. The IT industry broke it read more
into three categories to help better dene use cases.
FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES
a) Software as a Service (SaaS) software is owned, delivered and managed remotely
by one or more providers. To start, Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, is a popular way of
accessing and paying for software. Instead of installing software on your own servers, Tags / Categories
SaaS companies enable you to rent software thats hosted, this is typically the case for a
Business Intelligence (44)
monthly or yearly subscription fee. More and more CRM, marketing, nance, and
Conferences (1)
business intelligence tools use SaaS technology, and even Adobes Creative Suite has
Dashboard Reporting (20)
adopted the model.
Data Analysis (27)
Data Visualization (19)
b) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) compute resources, complemented by storage
KPIs (8)
and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by providers and available to
Market Intelligence (1)
customers on-demand.
New Features (1)
News (41)
c) Platform as a Service (PaaS) the broad collection of application infrastructure
Real World Stats (10)
(middleware) services. These services include application platform, integration, business
Security (2)
process management and database services.
Technology (3)
Uncategorized (3)
All of this is a deviation from traditional on-premise computing which is done via a local
Area Chart (1)
server or personal computer. These traditional methods are increasingly being left
Buzzwords (1)
behind. In fact, IDGs recently published Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey (2016)
Dashboard (1)
found that by 2018 the typical IT department will have the majority of their apps and
Data Visualization Tools (1)
platforms (60%) residing in the cloud.
Inspiration (1)
Line Chart (1)
Mobile BI (1)
Resources (1)
SaaS (1)
Scatterplot (1)
Spider Chart (1)
Stacked Chart (1)
http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 3/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

Visual Storytelling (1)

FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES

In an effort to do everything from offer better in-store customer service to fully

leverage advances in manufacturing, companies from even most traditional and
change-resistant sectors are seeing the writing on the wall: Cloud technology strategies
cut cost and risk. Lalit Bhatt, Project Leader at Maruti Techlabs.

Though the opportunities are great, the cloud computing explosion hasnt come without
challenges. We discussed already some of these cloud computing challenges when
comparing cloud and on premise BI strategies. Now lets go over more of those
challenges organizations are facing, and how they are being addressed.

Current Cloud ComputingChallenges

In January 2016, RightScale conducted its fth annual State of the Cloud Survey on the
latest cloud computing trends. They questioned 1,060 technical professionals across a
broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud infrastructure. Their
ndings were insightful, especially in regards to current cloud computing challenges.
http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 4/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

Below, we have expanded upon some of their ndings and provided additional cloud
computing problemsthat businesses may need to address.
FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES

1. Lack of resources/expertise
For the longest time, security was the number one voiced cloud challenge. In
2016however, lack of resources/expertise inched ahead. Organizations are increasingly
placing more workloads in the cloud while cloud technologies continue to rapidly
advance. Due to these factors organizations are having a hard time keeping up with the
tools. Also, the need for expertise continues to grow. These challenges can be

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 5/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

minimized through additional training of IT and development staff. A strong CIO

championing cloud adoption also helps. As Cloud Engineer Drew Firment puts it:
FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES
The success of cloud adoption and migrations comes down to your people
and the investments you make in a talent transformation program. Until
you focus on the #1 bottleneck to the ow of cloud adoption, improvements
made anywhere else are an illusion.

SME organizations may nd adding cloud specialists to their IT teams to be prohibitively

costly. Luckily, many common tasks performed by these specialists can be automated.
To this end companies are turning to DevOps tools, like Chef and Puppet, to perform
tasks like monitoring usage patterns of resources and automated backups at
predened time periods. These tools also help optimize the cloud for cost, governance,
and security.

2. Security issues
Resource/expertise concerns slightly passed security cloud computing problems in
2016. We already mentioned the hot debate around data security in our BI trends for
2017, andsecurity has indeed been a primary, and valid, concern from the start of cloud
computing technology: you are unable to see the exact location where your data is
stored or being processed. Headlines highlighting data breaches, compromised
credentials and broken authentication, hacked interfaces and APIs, account hijacking
havent helped alleviate concerns. All of this makes trusting sensitive and proprietary
data to a third party hard to stomach for some. Luckily as cloud providers and users,
mature security capabilities are constantly improving. To ensure your organizations
privacy and security is intact, verify the SaaS provider has secure user identity
management, authentication and access control mechanisms in place. Also, check
whichdata security and privacy laws they are subject to.

While you are auditing a providers security and privacy laws, make sure to also conrm
the third biggest issue is taken care of: compliance. Your organization needs to be able
http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 6/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

to comply with regulations and standards, no matter where your data is stored.
FREE TRIAL
Speaking of storage, also ensure the provider has strict data recovery policies in place.
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES
3. Cost management and containment
For the most part cloud computing can save businesses money. In the cloud, an
organization can easily ramp up its processing capabilities without making large
investments in new hardware. Businesses can instead access extra processing through
pay-as-you go models from public cloud providers. However, the on-demand and
scalable nature of cloud computing services makes it some times dicult to dene and
project quantities and costs. Luckily there are several ways to keep cloud costs in check
including.

Exclusive Bonus Content: Download our free cloud computing tips!

Check out these 6 challenges and how to face them.

4. Governance/Control
Proper IT governance should ensure IT assets are implemented and used according to
agreed-upon policies and procedures; ensure that these assets are properly controlled
and maintained; and ensure that these assets are supporting your organizations
strategy and business goals. In todays cloud based world, IT does not always have full
control over the provisioning, de-provisioning and operations of infrastructure. This has
increased the diculty for IT to provide the governance, compliance and risk
management required. To mitigate the various risks and uncertainties in transitioning to
the cloud, IT must adapt its traditional IT governance and control processes to include
the cloud. To this effect the role of central IT teams in cloud has been evolving over the
last few years. Along with business units, central IT is increasingly playing a role in
selecting, brokering, and governing cloud services. On top of this third party cloud
computing/management providers are progressively providing governance support and
best practices.
5. Performance
http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 7/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

5. Performance
FREE TRIAL
When a business moves to the cloud it becomes dependent on the service providers.
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES
This partnership often provides businesses with innovative technologies they wouldnt
otherwise be able to access. On the other hand the performance of the organizations
BI and other cloud based systems is also tied to the performance of the cloud provider
when it falters. When your provider is down, you are also down.

This isnt uncommon, over the past couple of years all the big cloud players have
experienced outages. Make sure your provider has the right processes in place and
that they will alert you if there is ever an issue.

For the data driven organization real time data is imperative. With an inherent lack of
control that comes with cloud computing, companies may run into real time monitoring
issues. Make sure your SaaS provider has real time monitoring policies in place to help
mitigate these issues.

6. Segmented usage and adoption

Most organizations did not have a robust cloud adoption strategy in place when they
started to move to the cloud. Instead, ad-hoc strategies sprouted, fueled by several
components. One of them was the speed of cloud adoption. Another one was the
staggered expiration of data centre contracts/equipment, which led to intermittent cloud
migration. Finally, there also were individual development teams using public cloud for
specic applications or projects. These bootstrap environments have fostered full
integration and maturation issues including:

Isolated cloud projects lacking shared standards

Ad hoc security congurations
Lack of cross-team shared resources and learnings

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 8/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

In fact, a recent survey by IDC of 6,159 executives found that just 3% of respondents
dene their cloud strategies as optimised. Luckily, centralized IT, strong governance
FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT
and control policies, INDUSTRIES
and some heavy lifting can CUSTOMERS PRICING
get usage, adoption, COMPANY
and cloud RESOURCES
computing strategies inline.

Exclusive Bonus Content: Download our free cloud computing tips!

Check out these 6 challenges and how to face them.

In the End the Cloud Still Wins

It is no secret, cloud computing is revolutionizing the IT industry. It is also shaking up the
business intelligence (BI) landscape, and well, pretty everything else it touches. As the
cloud adoption exponentially grows, businesses of all sizes are realizing the benets.
For startups and small to medium sized businesses (SMEs), that cant afford costly
server maintenance, but also may have to scale overnight, the benets are especially
great.

While cloud computing challenges do exist, if properly addressed these 6 issues dont
mean your IT roadmap has to remain anchored on-premise. Business intelligence (BI)
and cloud computing are an ideal match, as the rst oneprovides the right information
to the right people while the latteris an agile way to access BI applications. To make the
best out ofit, you should takea strategic iterative approach to implementation, explore
hybrid cloud solutions, involve business and IT teams, invest in a CIO, and choosethe
right BISaaS partner. All this will ensure that the benets of cloud business intelligence
will far outway thechallenges.

(7 votes, average: 4.86 out of 5)

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 9/10
2/18/2017 6CloudComputingChallengesBusinessesAreFacing

FREE TRIAL
PRODUCT INDUSTRIES CUSTOMERS PRICING COMPANY RESOURCES
FOLLOW DATAPINE SKALITZER STRASSE 33
10999 BERLIN, GERMANY
LinkedIn
+49 30 6920 9427
Managing Partners: Martin Blumenau, Jakob Rehermann | Trade Register:
Berlin-Charlottenburg HRB 144962 B | Tax Identication Number: DE 28 552 2148 CONTACT@DATAPINE.COM

http://www.datapine.com/blog/top6cloudcomputingchallenges/# 10/10