Advantages and Challenges of Adopting Cloud Computing from an Enterprise Perspective

With the rapid development of processing and storage technologies and the success of the Internet, computing resources have become cheaper, more powerful and more available than ever before. This technological trend has enabled the realization of a new computing model called cloud computing, in which resources are provided as general utilities that can be leased and released by users through the Internet in an on-demand fashion. The organizations are gaining more experience in the cloud and they start to shift more core business functions onto cloud platforms. Because of this fact, we are seeing that cloud adoption is significantly more complex than we imagined initially, particularly in terms of data management, system integration and the management of multiple cloud providers. Cloud computing is of growing interest to companies around the globe, but many are finding greater costs and greater obstacles to the adoption of cloud computing than they anticipated. In this case, is cloud computing still able to deliver all the promises? In this paper we will analyze from a company's point of view the factors that need to be considered by an enterprise when making the decision of using cloud computing. Some of the companies are moving towards cloud computing just because it is the latest trend in information technology. On the other hand, other companies cannot even take into consideration the idea of having their sensitive data outside their premises. Both of these cases represent companies that are just not very well informed. We are not sustaining that cloud computing is a perfect solution for everybody, but adopting it or not should be result of a very well informed analysis. We will analyze the positive and negative aspects of each of the following factors: integration with existing IT infrastructure and existing software, costs, return on investment, performances, security. Also, we will correlate all these factors with the company size and business area in order to identify if or what type of cloud computing solution is suitable for their needs.