Diving Deeper into Cloud Computing
The main reason for an organization to shift its IT resources to the cloud are because the benefits of the migration outweigh the risks. The three major justifications for migrating to the cloud include cost, scale and performance, and increased reliability (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013). These three topics, plus the concept of trust will be addressed in the next few paragraphs. Personal experiences from my career experiences will be applied to general concepts in this section and other sections.
Cost
First and foremost, the cost, or total cost of ownership (TCO), an organization anticipates using a private or hybrid cloud model can offer a lower 5-year total cost. This is due to multiple reasons: not having to pay for entire servers, racks, wiring, and the expertise to set this all up. Maintaining hardware failures and spending resources to maintain the hardware with the latest software and monitoring devices is another expense that is managed by the service provider. However, without proper planning, an organization can come into a scenario where they are significantly paying more for cloud resources than had they utilized on-premise servers. For example, if an organization selected a software as a service solution that was overly comprehensive for their needs and over-provisioned users, they would be overpaying for the solution and the number of users.
Scale
Global Scale and Performance is another major factor to consider. Organizations do not have to provision and stand-up a set of servers’ half-way across the world. Cloud computing is improving scale with a few clicks of a button for any organization. For example, when architecting for a global retail organization, having your servers and resources close to the end-users is important. Latency, an important measure of the time it takes for data to transfer from one location to another, is critical for businesses to monitor. A few seconds of change in latency periods can change business profitability in the millions, or tens of millions if considering Black Friday sales for companies such as Amazon, Walmart, or Best Buy.
Amazon’s offering of DyanmoDB or Azure’s CosmosDB are globally scalable data storage solutions for retail organizations. Replicating the storage across multiple regions globally allows latency periods to remain in the low milliseconds and maintains high customer satisfaction due to high rate of read/write transactions.
Reliability
Improved reliability and security are the last major considerations that will be discussed in this paper. Improved reliability is discussed in terms of Service Level Agreement (SLA), or up-time. A 99.9 percent SLA means that the resource(s) will be available 99.9 percent of the year. In minutes, that equates to 8 hours and 45 minutes a year of downtime. Increasing that SLA to 99.99 percent, the downtime equals 52 minutes a year. For a large organization that has tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute, every minute of downtime is critical and even 99.9 percent, or “three-nines”, can have consequences worth tens of millions of dollars. While SLAs can compensate the organization for the cost of resources during downtime, SLAs do not provide insurance against the potential loss of revenue. Therefore, architects of solutions must pay very close attention to the design of the infrastructure to allow for high-availability and high-reliability.
Trust
A comprehensive study on the cost-benefit analysis of an organizations intentions to switch to the cloud showed that trust and risk were the most critical aspects that businesses considered in making these decisions (Chang & Hsu, 2019). Essentially, the study researched and determined that the perceived increased trust in cloud providers reduces the perceived risk to the organization making the decision. Similarly, the perceived increased control over the cloud environments and which services to use decreases the businesses risk and privacy apprehensions. Studies like these allow practitioners, developers, and decision-makers with more confidence in assessing a cloud migration choice.
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