Examples for Cloud Deployment Models in a Business Environment
83
establishing a secure environment by using reliable security and encryption
mechanisms, as well as enabling business process with near-zero latency in order
to guarantee a smooth work-flow. But as soon as a company decides to re-source
their business processes on-premise again (Faltus, 2013), the following question is
proposed: How to return from cloud services? Hence a company must realize what
it means to be in the cloud and what to do in case of a potential re-sourcing.
Höllwarth (2013) sees the lack of knowledge about cloud, insufficient know-how, a
missing cloud strategy, as well as the absence of a motivating business case, as
key elements for concerns towards cloud services.
Cloud service providers use huge server farms to provide users with sufficient
computing power, or data storage possibilities. Companies that implement cloud
services often do not know how the data is stored and where the server farms are
located (Schweighofer, 2013). The potential danger that derives from this is that
many countries have strict regulations and policies about data handling. Due to
different laws that vary from one country to the other, it is not an easy task for a
company to comply with the country of origin regulations, if they use cloud services
from an unknown provider. This might not only have an impact on security, but may
also cause legal effect.
Cloud services are provisioned through the Internet, which means that a permanent
Internet connection is mandatory. This can become a pitfall for companies for two
reasons: Although many providers guarantee a 99.9% uptime, it still means that
there is a possible downtime of about 42 minutes per month (Bauer & Randee, 2012,
pp. 22-23) & (Turner, Seader, Renaud, & Brill, 2008, pp. 4-5) & (Faltus, 2013). If a
company for example outsourced important business processes in the cloud and a
downtime occurs, everything grinds to a halt. The company is therefore not able to
do business during this period, implying costs without earnings. Another issue is the
Internet connection itself. Statistik Austria’s survey about the availability of Internet
connection in Austria’s companies (2013) revealed that 98% have Internet
connection. However Internet connection speeds greatly vary, especially between
urban areas and rural ones. Asynchronous connections, like for example ADSL
usually do have a good download speed, but mostly also a very low upload speed.
