Risks of Moving to the Cloud and How to Address Them

In my last month's column, I talked about 5 potential reasons SMEs should adopt cloud computing. Those are certainly valid, but it's not as if there are no caveats involved. Those will exist no matter what technology you choose to adopt, whether it's cloud computing or local implementations. So this time, I'm going to focus on the potential risks you need to be aware of before moving to the cloud, and what can be done to mitigate them.

The two key risks involved in moving to the cloud are those of data being either lost or compromised. A third risk with higher chances of occurrence, is the potential unavailability of your cloud services due to a technical snag somewhere (disk crash, WAN connectivity issues, ports blocked due to a change of firewall, or something else). None of these risks is affordable for any company. In fact, recently I read an incident where a small business owner had his website and all his customer contacts put up at an ISP's servers and was using a tablet to access all his data. One fine day, the ISP went belly up and shut down, leaving the small business owner completely stranded with no way to retrieve any of his data. Possibly there were many other small business owners who met with a similar fate.

Agreed that chances of this happening with large cloud players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are slim, but data losses due to disk failures are a reality even with larger players. Moreover, there are also a host of smaller cloud service providers out there as well. What if they go down and take all your data with them? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

The first thing to remember is that it's your data that's hosted at the cloud service provider, so the responsibility of securing and backing it up is also yours. Find out whether your service provider is backing up your data, and how quickly can you get it back if something went wrong? If the data is extremely critical and your business depends upon it, then setup automated tasks to backup your data to a local drive. This way, even if something went wrong, you will still have access to your data.

The thought of data loss or theft scares a lot of small business owners away from the cloud. But, come to think of it, cloud computing may not really be the technology to be blamed. Suppose it wasn't there, then would data loss or theft stop? No. It would still happen--laptops do get stolen, PC and server hard disks still crash, and there are break-ins to an office. So, instead of getting scared by technology, do proper background checks of the cloud service provider, and ensure you've taken enough measures to backup your data. There's no other shortcut!