Companies ignoring critical issues when moving to cloud services

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Cloud services offer some significant advantages to corporate IT departments, but rushing to adopt them could backfire without taking into account existing infrastructure, according to a report from research firm Vanson Bourne.

One in five CIOs and IT decision-makers surveyed said that network upgrades were part of their cloud service plans, although more than twice that proportion acknowledged the importance of such considerations.

Vanson Bourne compared cloud-adopting companies with poor network infrastructure to retailers without effective supply and distribution systems.

Broadly speaking, the importance of network infrastructure to the cloud is in the bandwidth available. Given the need for cloud services to constantly communicate with and transfer data back and forth from remote servers, any hitches in this flow of information have the potential to undo all the gains in efficiency promised by the system's adoption.

In addition to making sure network capability is up to the challenge of using a cloud app, experts say existing security measures should be examined for flaws and strengthened if possible. Encryption - the use of a VPN service - is also highly recommended.