Cloud storage: The top five things that go wrong – and how to avoid them

Cloud storage provides cost savings and ease of management, but there are pitfalls – and here are the top five things that can go wrong!

When your data resides in cloud storage on a third party’s infrastructure, some of the attendant risks may be attributable to the provider, some to you and some to both.

Data crosses multiple systems on its journey to a cloud service provider’s storage and, the more waypoints there are, the greater the potential for things to go wrong.

Key to all of those issues is getting it right at the start. But if you don’t, what are the five main things that can go wrong – and what should you do about them?

1. You buy cloud as a panacea

Too often, data is pushed out to the cloud to save money, perhaps by reducing the in-house IT function without considering the wider issues involved.

For example, many companies buy cloud storage in the hope it will result in a rationalisation of their data assets. The risk of this approach is that two processes – rationalisation and moving to the cloud – become conflated.

The top five pitfalls of cloud storage – and how to remedy them

  1. You buy cloud as a panacea
  2. You choose the wrong supplier
  3. You buy the wrong service plan
  4. You lose control over your data
  5. There’s not enough bandwidth

What can happen then is that a mess that existed in-house is exported to the cloud, where lack of preparation costs money and the risk of fixing it is higher.

Instead, the organisation needs to develop a clear set of agreed success criteria to build cloud storage into its long-term strategy. For example, have the organisation’s storage needs been fully re-evaluated before moving the data? Could re-organising the data have saved as much or more? Could you have made better use of existing hardware assets, before making some or many of them redundant – and has their residual value been taken into account when evaluating cloud storage?

Once in the cloud, data still needs managing. Unless IT quickly gets on top of monitoring and managing cloud-based data, there is a danger that, in the event of problems, users…… (continued)

Source:- http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Cloud-storage-Five-things-that-go-wrong-and-how-to-avoid-them