Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Advantages of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing technology offers various benefits to both cloud service consumers and cloud service providers. The main advantage of cloud computing systems and technologies is increased economic return due to reduced maintenance costs related to infrastructure and IT software. Cloud computing offers the following benefits:

1. Pay as per use: On-demand access to pay-as-you-go computing resources on a short-term basis and the ability to release these computing resources when they are no longer needed.

2. Reduced investment and proportional costs: The product wholesaler purchase goods in bulk at a low price. Public cloud providers base their business model on the mass acquisition of IT resources that are then made available to cloud consumers via attractive prices. This opens the door for organizations to gain access to powerful infrastructure without having to purchase it themselves.

3. Accessibility from anywhere: Resources can be accessed from anywhere, irrespective of location and device. This feature facilitates business continuity around the clock.

4. Increased scalability: The business load can be handled with the scalability of the respective resources without much effort, time, and cost.

5. Increased availability and reliability: Resources provided as services are available all the time. Even if there is a failure in any of the components of a service, the provider immediately identifies, isolates, and replaces the failed components without any performance degradations.

6. Dynamic provisioning: It is the perception of having unlimited computing resources that are available on demand, thereby reducing the need to prepare for provisioning.

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is broadly acknowledged as a revolutionary IT concept along with customized assistance. Some of the limitations of cloud computing are listed below:

1. Availability of Services: Consumer administration interfaces of public clouds are only possible through the Internet. As services are a primary concern of consumers, they sometimes need to discard all the data from the cloud environment provided to them, while sometimes they may want to recover all the data. There is an augmented risk of disaster in this when compared to conventional services. There are more ways to access the application or information over cloud computing.

2. Data Lock-in: SaaS permits the services to be interoperable on every cloud. However, shifting data and applications from one platform to another is a challenge to the cloud provider for a big organization handling high volumes of data. Google is the single cloud supplier to attain a more typical environment and they also have a scheme known as Data Liberation Front.

3. Data Segregation: It’s not simple to isolate cloud users from each other. A straight effect of the multitenant control mode, where virtual machines of distinct consumers are co-located on a single server or data on single hard disks. It is the main concern related to privacy. This set of risks comprises matters regarding the breakdown of mechanisms to separate memory or storage among distinct users.

4. Privilege Neglect: Companies sometimes take advantage of the liberty given to them. They disclose sensitive data of their company to others for some benefit. The threat of a malicious insider with access to confidential data is a concern for any outsourced computation model. Miscreants might affect and harm the consumer’s fame and brand or openly harm the consumer.

5. Scaling Resources: A web application designer who hosts its service on a cloud can view how the reply time gradually increases when the usage of the application rises since the cloud doesn’t scale up resources rapidly enough. The capability of scaling resources up and down to meet workload is one of the chief benefits of cloud computing. Resources pooling through multitenancy is also an important element that is managed by the cloud provider.

6. Data Location: The geographical site of the data also counts as a challenge. Being aware of the geographical site of data is essential to protect it. Since there could be significant differences amid rigid strategies in various countries. The route followed by the data is also important. It may be difficult for an application operator to install applications at the smallest ‘distance’ from the users.

7. Deletion of Data: Public cloud users might need their data to be removed, which is erased from the cloud. Sometimes, one company migrates its data to another cloud provider. In that case, they want completely used by the malicious user later. Various security agencies have been advised to use ciphertext forms of data for high security.

8. Recovery and Backup: For safety purposes, keeping the data of a consumer safe at different locations, for easy recovery and backup, if there is any failure is a big challenge. A proposal of data backup must be proposed to cloud suppliers in the event of a disaster. This can be achieved by the replication of data diagonally on various sites and the proposal should be referred to in the service level contract.

9. Offline Clouds: For several users who require an application to be accessible the whole time through, becoming entirely dependent on the Internet could prove to be highly risky or unfeasible. This generates greater trouble in case the user is shuffling and there is a change in the connection quality.

Thus in several cases, trusting the Internet service supplier isn’t an alternative. At present, a web browser is a widely used software application and all applications can be easily accessed through the interactive web browser. Locally, it is not necessary to maintain a hard disk with a strong processor because customized services are available on the cloud.

10. Unpredictable Performance: The cloud-end consumer would not even know the number of physical machines on which their application was functioning. The single source of information which the user has regarding these servers is the hardware specification offered by the cloud supplier for every kind of service.

Further, these metrics don’t have a similar significance in the cloud server as they had in a conventional server, since in the cloud server, some users can share I/O resources and compute on a specified case of a physical processor. A similar performance at similar financial levels has been expected by the user, but this might not be simply accurate. Since the performance depends on several aspects and the end has no control over many of them.