The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

One of the underlying advantages of cloud development is that of economy of scale. By taking advantage of the infrastructure provided by a cloud computing

vendor, a developer can offer better, cheaper, and more reliable applications than is possible within a single enterprise. The application can utilize

the full resources of the cloud, if needed—without requiring a company to invest in similar physical resources.

Speaking of cost, because cloud services follow the one-to-many model, cost is significantly reduced over individual desktop program deployment. Instead of

purchasing or licensing physical copies of software programs (one for each desktop), cloud applications are typically “rented,” priced on a per-user basis.

It’s more of a subscription model than an asset purchase (and subsequent depreciation) model, which means there’s less up-front investment and a more

predictable monthly expense stream.

IT departments like cloud applications because all management activities are managed from a central location rather than from individual sites or workstations.

This enables IT staff to access applications remotely via the web. There’s also the advantage of quickly outfitting users with the software they need (known as “rapid provisioning), and adding more computing resources as more users tax the system (automatic scaling). When you need more storage space or bandwidth, companies can just add another virtual server from the cloud. It’s a lot easier than purchasing, installing, and configuring a new server in their data center.

For developers, it’s also easier to upgrade a cloud application than with traditional desktop software. Application features can be quickly and easily updated by upgrading the centralized application, instead of manually upgrading individual applications located on each and every desktop PC in the organization. With a cloud service, a single change affects every user running the application, which greatly reduces the developer’s workload.

Perhaps the biggest perceived disadvantage of cloud development is the same one that plagues all web-based applications: Is it secure? Web-based applications have long been considered potential security risks. For this reason, many businesses prefer to keep their applications, data, and IT operations under their own control.

That said, there have been few instances of data loss with cloud-hosted applications and storage. It could even be argued that a large cloud hosting operation is likely to have better data security and redundancy tools than the average enterprise. In any case, however, even the perceived security danger from hosting critical data and services offsite might discourage some companies from going this route. Another potential disadvantage is what happens if the cloud computing host goes offline. Although most companies say this isn’t possible, it has happened.

Amazon’s EC2 service suffered a massive outage on February 15, 2008, that wiped out some customer application data. (The outage was caused by a software deployment that erroneously terminated an unknown number of user instances.) For clients expecting a safe and secure platform, having that platform go down and your data disappear is a somewhat rude awakening. And, if a company relies on a third-party cloud platform to host all of its data with no other physical backup, that data can be at risk.