Top 10 Reasons Cloud Computing Deployments Fail: Page 3

8. Failing to understand financial realities.

Many organizations embrace the cloud because it is sold as being cheaper than in-house IT. That’s often true, but even when cloud services are cheaper, organizations may perceive them as being more expensive.

Why?

“We have so little visibility into what we’re paying for various technologies today that it’s easy to get sticker shock,” Stroud of ISACA and CA said. “That’s not the cloud providers’ fault.”

It’s not necessarily your fault either. Financial visibility into IT systems is a tricky matter. Many costs are opaque. Who consumes what? Who pays for what? Who gets to consume how much? For many IT departments, the answer to those questions is fuzzy at best. With the cloud, though, those answers become painfully clear.

9. Failing to understand the legal complexities of the cloud.

When you outsource computing resources, your business, no matter how small, may have opened itself up to the legal risks of a much bigger company. You may have to comply with laws from different jurisdictions, and you may face different liabilities, depending on where your data resides.

According to Gartner, “Service providers have not done a good job of explaining which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must, therefore, meet. The service consumer needs reassurance that the provider does not violate any country’s rules for which the consumer may be held accountable.”

Complying with industry regulations is also more troublesome. Even if cloud services limit your risk and technically make you more compliant, you may have a more difficult time proving that.

10. Failing to get off the sidelines.

Finally, the biggest reason cloud deployments fail is because they don’t get started in the first place. Too many organizations fret about issues that are not all that different from the ones they have in their own data centers. Outages, security breaches and compliance are all general IT challenges, not cloud-specific ones.

The vast majority of people I corresponded with for this story overwhelmingly advocated cloud computing. I received several emails saying that they’ve seen few, if any, cloud failures.

The truth is that the cloud solves more problems than it creates. The cloud eases your IT management and maintenance headaches and lets you turn your attention away from IT and back to your core business. Failing to understand that is a huge mistake.