Running your business in the clouds

1. Look closely at your IT needs and limitations before you determine which cloud services are right for you.
2. First, cloud services must be self-service: If you can’t go to a Web form, set up an account, and start provisioning the service you want, then it’s not a cloud service.
3. cloud services must scale transparently
4. Then there’s the lock-in problem. When you move data and applications to a cloud provider, it may be hard to move to other cloud providers or back to an on-premises infrastructure. This problem arises because many cloud computing providers, in their haste to get to market,use proprietary mechanisms to deploy applications and store data. You may discover you don’t like your cloud solution, but it may be too difficult or costly to go elsewhere.
5. Finally, you need to consider compliance. There are many regulations about how data, such as patient data and financial data, is stored, protected, and managed. For example, in many European countries it’s illegal to send some financial data outside of the country’s borders, so you need to make sure your cloud computing provider is not replicating to remote data centers. Moreover, there are very strict laws about the management of patient information. If data is mismanaged and not secured in the ways as specified by the law, you could find yourself in a great deal of hot water.
6. Enterprise applications are the low-hanging fruit of cloud computing.