Conclusion & Future Outlook
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Cloud services are provisioned through a third-party provider. This means that a
company using such services gives up their autonomy to a certain degree and
enters a relationship of dependency. This dependency is expressed through several
factors: If a company outsourced vital business processes into the cloud and the
cloud service provider is not able to deliver, because of for example a server failure,
the company is not able to maintain the work-flow. Such a downtime would imply
costs without earnings. The “Vendor Lock-In” also makes it difficult for companies
to exit the cloud. As soon as a company aligned their business processes with a
service provider, it is difficult to go back to the state before cloud. In this context an
insufficiently formulated Software License Agreement can become a serious
disadvantage. In such a SLA the tasks, responsibilities, liabilities and limitation of
both the company and the service provider must be clearly defined.
Furthermore security and data espionage are often reasons for a cautiously
optimistic attitude towards cloud services. In a business environment data involves
sensitive information, trade secrets, know-how or other assets valuable for a
company. When using cloud services, data and thus part of the company’s “identity”
is stored and processed off-premise. However the literature and experts claim that
trustworthy cloud service providers have higher security standards, stability, and fail
safety than most datacenters of medium-sized companies.
Data handling is closely related to compliance with regulations and policies.
Different countries have different compulsory legal regulations for the handling of
data, data protection and data security. Companies are bound to meet the legal
requirements of their respective country. When a company decides to outsource
sensitive data into a server farm located in another country, this can indeed be a
pitfall implying severe legal effect. Both the literature and experts agree that this
topic is an important part of any cloud strategy.
Summarized it can be said that cloud services are a promising new technology with
several opportunities, but also specific dangers and pitfalls. The experts and
literature mutually agree upon the fact that in the near future there will not be the
question whether to use cloud services or not. They will be a natural component of
modern Information Technology and become a commodity. Until then, it is
