Myths About The Cloud

And the Truth Behind Them

Myth: The cloud is not secure.
Truth: Public clouds are fundamentally multi-tenant to justify the scale and economics of the cloud. As such, security is a common concern. Whereas the traditional security perimeter is a network firewall, the cloud security perimeter now becomes the hypervisor and/or underlying cloud application. So far, security in the cloud has been good, but this is very cloud-dependent and requires a solid design and operational rigor that prioritizes security. Be sure to ask potential cloud computing providers about security from technical, operational, and control perspectives, as well as what experience they have being stewards of customer systems and data.

Myth: The cloud is not reliable.
Truth: No system has 100% uptime, and neither does the Cloud. Given the scale, however, cloud computing services are typically designed to provide high redundancy and availability. While this same level of redundancy/availability is possible to achieve in-house or with dedicated hosting, it's generally cost prohibitive except for the most critical systems. The cloud enables a higher level of reliability at a fraction of the cost.

Myth: Performance is a problem in the cloud.
Truth: It depends. There are different types of clouds and use cases. In many instances, performance is higher in the cloud because there is more available capacity and scalability. In other cases (most notably running a database server), performance may be less than a traditional server. It's best to benchmark your application in the cloud to determine any performance impact (good or bad). If performance is an issue, consider a hybrid solution (see Truth # 10) that allows you to synergize the best of both worlds: the scalability and cost efficiencies of cloud computing and the performance of dedicated servers.

Myth: The cloud is not for enterprises.
Truth: The benefits of cloud computing apply equally to enterprises as they do to SMBs, startups and consumers. Since enterprises are typically more risk averse, new technologies are generally adopted by small business first. That said, overall cloud adoption rates are increasing substantially and we are seeing enterprise adoption today. Expect to see a significant inflection point in the next several years where cloud is a standard enterprise fixture.