Should you move your data to the cloud?  That is the question. The answer is not simple.  While moving data to the cloud is all the rage, the fact is a large majority of the Fortune 500 companies are not keeping much of their data in the cloud.  At least not yet.  Why is that?  Well, some of those reasons include:

• Security concerns (potential for compromised information, issues of privacy when data is stored on a public facility, might be more prone to outside security threats because its high-profile, some providers might not implement the same layers of protection you can achieve in-house)
• Lack of operational control: Lack of access to servers (i.e. say you are hacked and want to get to security and system log files; if something goes wrong you have no way of controlling how and when a response is carried out; the provider can update software, change configuration settings, and allocate resources without your input or your blessing; you must conform to the environment and standards implemented by the provider)
• Lack of ownership (an outside agency can get to data easier in the cloud data center that you don’t own vs getting to data in your onsite location that you own.  Or a concern that you share a cloud data center with other companies and someone from another company can be onsite near your servers)
• Compliance restrictions
• Regulations (health, financial)
• Legal restrictions (i.e. data can’t leave your country)
• Company policies
• You may be sharing resources on your server, as well as competing for system and network resources
• Data getting stolen in-flight (i.e. from the cloud data center to the on-prem user)

If you can get past most or all of those reasons, the cloud offers a ton of benefits:

• Fire up a server quickly (abbreviated infrastructure implementation build-out times)
• Grow hardware as demand is needed (unlimited elastic scale).  Change hardware instantly
• Reduce hardware as demand lessons (pay for what you need)
• Don’t need co-location space, so cost savings (space, power, etc)
• No need to manage the hardware infrastructure, reducing staff
• No hardware costs
• No commitment or long-term vendor lock
• Allows companies to benefit from changes in the technology impacting the latest storage solutions
• High availability and disaster recovery done for you
• More frequent updates to OS, sql server, etc
• Automatic updates
• Automatic geography redundancy
• Really helpful for proof-of-concept (POC) or development projects with a known lifespan

Also, there are some constraints of on-premise data:

• Scale constrained to on-premise procurement
• Capex up-front costs, although some companies may prefer this over a yearly operating expense (OpEx)
• A staff of employees or consultants must be retained to administer and support the hardware and software in place
• Expertise needed for tuning and deployment

But even if you have valid reasons why you are not able to put data in the cloud, this is almost always just for sensitive data.  So think of putting all the non-sensitive data in the cloud and possibly obfuscating the sensitive data so that also can be put in the cloud.  Because in the long run the benefits of the cloud are so significant that every company’s goal should be to move most if not all of their data and infrastructure to the cloud.

These are just some quick bullet points to get you thinking about the pros and cons of moving to the cloud.  And the answer can be further muddied by adding into the discussion public cloud (Azure) versus private cloud (Cloud Platform System) – a discussion for later!

More info:

The Hybrid Cloud: Having your Cake

To Cloud or Not to Cloud, That is the Question

Microsoft adopts first international cloud privacy standard

6 Cloud Computing Myths That Can Trip Up Small Businesses

10 Security Reasons Why the Enterprise Still Fears the Cloud