Solutions to Top Five Challenges to Cloud Computing for Enterprises

¶ … deployment of cloud computing, which is a revolutionary technology for hosting and delivering services over the Internet, is characterized with some major challenges and concerns for enterprises. A brief overview of the top five challenges for the enterprise in cloud computing is discussed in the article. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the available solutions to these challenges including improved security controls, finding a suitable cloud provider, enhanced enterprise infrastructure, and comprehensive implementation guidelines. The author then examines the benefits and limitations of these available solutions in dealing with the challenges. The analysis is followed by a discussion of a new solution to these issues and concerns as well as reasons for such solution.

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a ground-breaking model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. This paradigm is engaging to business organizations since it removes the need for users to plan ahead for provisioning and enables enterprises to start from minimal and increase resources only when there is an increase in demand for service. However, the deployment and implementation of cloud computing for enterprises has been characterized with various challenges and security concerns. In essence, the successful deployment and cloud computing in an enterprise needs proper planning and understanding of the various emerging threats, risks, vulnerabilities, and potential counter-measures. As there are top five challenges in cloud computing for the enterprise, there are various available solutions with varying benefits and limitations, which necessitate the development of a new solution.

Cloud Computing Concept:

As previously mentioned, cloud computing has recently emerged as a pioneering model for hosting and distributing services over the Internet. Actually, the model entails sharing resources on a huge scale through a value effective and location independent process. While the resources on the cloud are deployed by the seller, they are utilized by the consumer (Belamkar, 2014). Cloud computing is very beneficial to organizations and companies because it is engaging to business organizations and gets rid of the necessity for users plan ahead for provisioning. It also enables enterprises to start from little and increase resources when it is necessary i.e. increase in service demand.

The significance of cloud computing is increasing on a daily basis as the concept is increasingly receiving attention in scientific and industrial communities or sectors. This trend is fueled by the maturity of the concept from a promising business model to one of the rapidly growing segments of the Information Technology business. Some of the major benefits that make cloud computing an attractive model include optimization of a business' capital investment, simplicity and quickness of operations and use, and enabling an enterprise to tap into a talent pool (Mahmood & Hill, 2011, p.5). The other benefits include enabling small businesses to access IT services and resources, provision of complex and novel computing architectures, and developing a mechanism for disaster recovery and business continuity. Cloud computing consist built-in benefits of availability, efficiency, and high utilization. Consequently, it promotes innovation, cost savings, simplicity, agility, and flexibility.

Top Five Challenges for the Enterprise in Cloud Computing:

Despite the provision of numerous opportunities to the IT business and business organizations, cloud computing is associated with various challenges for the enterprise. Most of these challenges were initially attributed to the fact that the concept was at its infancy stage. However, cloud computing has matured today from an operational perspective with regards to the delivery of strategic and tactical value expected (Hill, Hirsch, Lake & Moshiri, 2012, p.270). Nonetheless, business organizations that are unwilling to learn from the hyper-cycle history do not reap the benefits and will ultimately have difficulties in thriving and surviving. In contrast, organizations that are capable to adopt and create their business model are capable of developing and providing value in ways that enable them to gain competitive advantages.

As previously mentioned, the deployment of cloud computing in an enterprise infrastructure is accompanied with significant security concerns and challenges. While business organizations have carried out proper planning and attempted to understand emerging risks, vulnerabilities, and threats, cloud computing is still linked with some major security concerns. Business organizations have experienced and will continue to undergo various system losses in this cloud computing era because of the inherent risks associated with deploying the process in an enterprise infrastructure. The numerous system losses continue to have considerable effects on organizations' most valuable information and asset (Bisong & Rahman, 2011, p.30). The inherent risks and concerns are partly attributed to the fact that Cloud Computing is constantly evolving. An analysis of various studies about cloud computing challenges for the enterprise shows that the top five challenges include service quality, real benefits or business outcomes, security and privacy, integration, and performance or inadequate responses over network.

Enterprises state that service quality is one of the major factors for their reluctance to shift their business applications to cloud. They argue that the Service Level Agreements offered by the providers of cloud are currently insufficient to guarantee the needs for running production applications. These agreements are inadequate when associated with scalability, availability, and performance. While enterprises get compensation for the time the service was down, the existing Service Level Agreements do not cover business loss. Due to lack of proper service quality guarantee, enterprises are increasingly reluctant to host their critical business infrastructure in cloud computing.

Regardless of the various case studies and analysis that demonstrate the benefits emerging from implementation of cloud technologies, a huge number of customers are still not convinced regarding the potential benefits. Enterprises have expressed concerns regarding the ability to realize the full potential of the investment and incorporate cloud as part of the mainstream Information Technology Portfolio. Therefore, business organizations need an actual view of the real benefits of cloud computing instead of being provided with information about its potential to add value. This implies that return on investment models on cloud should incorporate specific metrics of conventional IT with cloud computing solutions. Such models should show real benefits in terms of compliance, time, profitability improvement, cost, quality, and revenue.

The other top challenge for the enterprise with regards to cloud computing is performance or inadequate responsiveness over network. This is challenge because the provision of complex services through network is clearly impossible if the network does not have adequate bandwidth. Since most of the existing cloud computing infrastructures have limited or minimal bandwidth, their performance is characterized with inadequate responsiveness over network. In addition, most of the existing cloud applications are relatively very bandwidth intensive ("Top 5 Challenges to Cloud Computing," 2011). Therefore, man enterprises and business organizations are waiting for better bandwidth and reduced costs before considering shifting into the cloud.

Enterprises also have integration challenges given the complexity of many cloud computing applications. Actually, these applications have multi-faceted integration requirements to connect to other cloud applications and other on-premise applications. Some of the major integration challenges occur in relation to integrating current cloud computing applications with existing data structures and applications in the enterprise.

The fifth and most significant concern or challenge that enterprises or business organizations encounter is security and privacy. Data security and privacy challenges rank as the highest concern in the deployment and implementation of cloud computing applications. Since this paradigm represents a seemingly new model for computing, it is characterized considerable uncertainty regarding the achievement of security at all levels. Security and privacy issues also emerge from the fact that cloud computing brings a new level of risk since important services are usually outsourced to a third-party. The outsourcing makes it difficult for enterprises to maintain data integrity and privacy, show compliance, and sustain the availability of data and service. Security challenges and concerns are associated with risk areas including lack of control, reliance on public Internet, external data storage, and amalgamation with internal security (Hashizume, Rosado, Fernandez-Medina & Fernandez, 2013).

Available Solutions:

In light of the top challenges for the enterprise in cloud computing, there are various available solutions that have been developed to address these challenges and concerns. These available solutions are geared towards enhancing the performance and effectiveness of cloud computing applications and models. Some of these available solutions include

Identification of an Appropriate Cloud Provider:

The first solution towards dealing with the major security challenges in cloud computing is the identification of a suitable cloud provider or vendor. An enterprise can significantly lessen these challenges through finding a suitable cloud provider or vendor. The need to identify an appropriate cloud provider is attributed to the fact that different vendors have varying cloud data management and IT security. Some of the characteristics of a suitable cloud vendor include compliance with standards and regulation and having adequate experience in the delivery of cloud computing applications.

Improved Security Controls:

Cloud providers have attempted to address the numerous security challenges and concerns through developing various security controls. Generally, security controls in cloud computing applications and models is largely similar to security controls in any Information Technology environment. These controls are similar with regards to operational models and the technologies utilized. To alleviate the security concerns and challenges, cloud solution providers have not only ensured that customers have similar security and privacy controls about their application and services but also provided evidence on security of their enterprises. Improved security controls have involved the development of more efficient security software in order to address the inefficient security approaches. Moreover, enterprises are increasingly encouraged to use cloud computing as thin technology in order to lessen exposure to threats from data-crammed laptops and backups.

Detailed Implementation Guidelines:

The second approach in dealing with the major cloud computing challenges for enterprises is the provision of comprehensive implementation guidelines. These guidelines are geared towards addressing the challenge of service quality, integration issues, and to enhance the real benefits from the implementation of cloud computing applications. Some of the major guidelines or steps to consider include understanding the cloud application, demand transparency, consider legal implications, and reinforce internal security. Enterprises should strive to understand how cloud computing applications transmit and handle data by realizing the impact of the application's loose structure on security of data transmitted on it. These enterprises should also ensure that cloud providers supply comprehensive information regarding its security architecture and is ready to accept periodic security audit. In addition to knowing the laws and regulations that affect data transmission on the cloud, enterprises should also enhance internal security measures through user access controls and use of firewalls.

Enhanced Enterprise Infrastructure:

The improvement of enterprise infrastructure is also an available solution to the major challenges in cloud computing. Enterprises need to develop infrastructure that promotes installation and design of hardware and software components (Tiwari & Mishra, 2012, p.309). These measures should be accompanied with the use of data encryption for security reasons by the developers to ensure that both parties share all security burdens. An improved enterprise infrastructure should also incorporate measures to prevent the organization from cyber attacks.

Benefits and Limitations of the Available Solutions:

The available solutions in addressing challenges in cloud computing for the enterprise have varying benefits and limitations. One of the benefits of these solutions is that they address security and privacy concerns or challenges to a large extent. These solutions deal with the security issues by providing steps that should be carried out by both the cloud provider and the enterprise in enhancing security. It seems that the security challenges have usually be associated with the cloud application itself rather than steps that enterprises should undertake to enhance security. Through providing these steps, the solutions demonstrate that the security of these applications and models can be greatly enhanced enterprise-wide and cloud provider initiatives. Secondly, the solutions also show that some of these concerns or challenges can be addressed through appropriate implementation guidelines. The issue of service quality and performance of cloud computing applications or models can be addressed through compliance with necessary implementation procedures and regulatory requirements. Without adherence to these guidelines, enterprises will experience tremendous difficulties in realizing the real benefits of cloud computing applications.

However, the limitations of the available solutions is that they provide a generalized approach to dealing with the challenges ad more emphasis on security concerns rather than the other challenges. Most of the available solutions primarily deal with security challenges and do not address other issues regarding cloud computing such as performance, service quality, and real benefits. In some cases, these approaches deal with the security challenges without differentiating between threats and vulnerabilities (Hashizume, Rosado, Fernandez-Medina & Fernandez, 2013). There is need to distinguish between threats and vulnerabilities in order to develop effective measures for addressing security concerns. Secondly, some existing solutions focus on mitigating threats without dealing with the actual issues in the cloud applications or models. Cloud providers need to build new techniques and redesigned conventional solutions that can work with cloud infrastructures and architectures.

A New Solution:

Since most of the available solutions are relatively ineffective in dealing with the challenges of cloud computing for enterprises, the development of a new solution is imperative in order for business organizations to accomplish the real benefits of these applications. According to Thuraisingham (2013), there have been various initiatives on cloud computing to deal with some of its challenges (p.601). Some of these efforts include cloud data storage, virtualization, and cloud data management. These efforts have been carried out because the main issue for cloud computing is dealing with huge amounts of data and processing.

In light of these varying initiatives, the most suitable solution to deal with the challenges or concerns is using virtualization with cloud computing. Virtualization and cloud computing are terms that have constantly been used interchangeably though they have different meanings and processes. While these two technologies are similar, they are quite different and not interchangeable since they can have significant impacts on an organization's business decisions. Virtualization is basically the software that divides physical infrastructures in order to create several dedicated resources. This software can also be regarded as the essential technology that drives cloud computing. It enables an organization to run several operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time. Therefore, virtualization enables enterprises to lessen Information Technology costs while increasing utilization, flexibility, and efficiency of the current computer hardware.

While virtualization is the software that controls hardware, cloud computing basically refers to a service that is brought by that control or manipulation (Angeles, 2014). The software acts as the foundational component of cloud computing and helps in delivering its value and benefits. Most of the major challenges for the enterprise in cloud computing are brought by the fact that virtualization and cloud computing processes are carried out separately. Virtualization is only used as the first step in deployment of cloud computing applications rather than the entire process. As a result, cloud computing infrastructures do not have the necessary different operating environments.

Therefore, most of the current challenges for enterprises in cloud computing can be addressed through using virtualization with cloud computing. This can be done through a process known as hypervisors, which is an ideal mechanism that provides different operating environments for cloud computing applications. Hypervisors is appropriate for cloud computing because of ability to load several operating systems while enabling achievement of things rapidly and efficiently in practical means. Virtualization acts as a critical component for cloud computing by simplifying the delivery of services and offering a platform for optimizing complicated Information Technology resources in a scalable way. The software is suitable for cloud computing because it can be applied widely to nearly everything associated with Information Technology.