Main challenges of the public cloud

From small enterprises to big tech companies, most of them face some common challenges when it comes to using and taking full advantage of public cloud providers. Some of the main challenges are as follows:

• Keeping cloud costs under control: Estimating and managing the costs of applications running in a public cloud provider is not a simple thing – cloud providers' billing models are multifaceted, with hundreds of different options and combinations, each with a pricing factor. Finding the best cost-benefit for one application can take a significant amount of time. To make things even more complex, cloud costs are usually dynamic and flexible – this may change significantly from time to time by type, duration of the contract, type of computing resources, and so on.
• Security: Data privacy and security is one of the major concerns with public clouds, according to the IDG's research – almost 40% of them classified it as the top challenge. That is, it is naturally much more difficult to secure an IT environment that comprises of multiple different providers than the old days, in which the IT department usually only had a few on-premises environments to manage.
• Governance, compliance, and configuration management: Multiple providers mean different offerings and standards, probably different teams working with each of them, and, consequently, heterogeneous environments.
• Integration: Organizations that have legacy services and want to integrate with their applications, which are hosted in the cloud, usually face some dilemmas on the best way to do those integrations. While cloud providers virtually have no limits, when you integrate your applications with your legacy infrastructure, you might be creating a harmful dependency, which will limit their scalability. However, mainly for big enterprises, those integrations are inevitable, so how can we prevent dependency issues (or at least minimize them)?
• Vendor lock-in: A common concern when adopting cloud providers is often related to being locked in with a single vendor and the business risks associated with it. I would say that there is a thin line between getting the best price from the cloud provider and being locked into their services. What could happen to the business if the cloud provider decides to raise prices in the next contractual negotiation? Is this a risk your business can afford? How can we mitigate it? Here, the quote you get what you pay for is suitable!
• Human resources and enablement: Hiring and keeping talented people in IT has always been a hard task; cloud technologies are no different. Cloud engineer, Architect, SRE, Cloud Native Application Developer – these are just a few job positions that open every day, and most companies struggle to fill them. Hiring, training, and maintaining a skilled team to develop and operate applications in the cloud is a real challenge.

Reference

You can check out the complete IDG research at https://www.idg.com/tools-for-marketers/2020-cloud-computing-study/ [Accessed 30 August 2021].