- Security and privacy of the cloud
Data in the cloud must be secure and confidential at all times. This means that the customers rely on the cloud service provider to achieve this. Therefore, the provider must take necessary security measures to ensure data is secure at all times. Security of data is also the customer's responsibility who should provide a strong password, regularly change it and never share it with anyone. While the service provider is responsible for data security in most instances, the customer also has a role to play in ensuring data is secure. Furthermore, since malware and hacking have emerged as key challenges to cloud service providers, they need to be aware of this and address it accordingly.
- Interoperability and portability
A customer must be given the freedom to select where to place their data and migration services in and out of the cloud. This means that there should be no bond period because this can hinder a customer and make life hard. Additionally, a cloud should provide facilities on the premises. The cloud provider must also eliminate remote access issues so that the customer can access services from anywhere.
- Cost management
The next challenge is cost management and managing risks involving costs. Cloud computing can save businesses money. However, organizations can easily ramp up their processing capabilities by using the pay-as-you-go models from public cloud providers. The on-demand and scalable nature of the cloud make it difficult to define and predict cots in some cases. Therefore, pay-as-you-go models can save money. Other methods that can be used to keep costs in check include using better financial analytics and reporting, automating policies, and keeping management reporting on course.
- Reliability and flexibility
Reliability and flexibility are some of the key challenges that cloud customers face. This affects access to services and affects the reliability of the cloud. To avoid this challenge, the cloud service provider should monitor all services offered by third parties and supervise them to ensure an improvement in performance, robustness and business dependency.
- Governance and control
There are various challenges that cloud computing faces, and one of them is governance and control. The right IT governance should ensure that information technology assets are implemented and used based on the policies and procedures that have been agreed upon. The policies ensure that the assets are properly controlled and maintained and ensure that the assets support the goals of businesses and their respective strategies. The regular changes in laws and regulations have made it hard for cloud providers to govern and comply with some regulations. To this effect, IT teams must evolve the policies to meet the challenges associated with the environment that keeps changing. This is not easy because some changes come in quickly, depending on the region.
In conclusion, some of the challenges identified above can be solved by having skilled management professionals. They can get support from tools like automation, management solutions, containers and auto-scaling features that can help reduce some key issues that cloud providers face.