Cloud Computing Challenges

Cloud computing, an emergent technology, has placed many challenges in different aspects of data and information handling. Some of these are shown in the following diagram:

Security and Privacy

Security and Privacy of information is the biggest challenge to cloud computing. Security and privacy issues can be overcome by employing encryption, security hardware and security applications.

Portability

This is another challenge to cloud computing that applications should easily be migrated from one cloud provider to another. There must not be vendor lock-in. However, it is not yet made possible because each of the cloud provider uses different standard languages for their platforms.

Interoperability

It means the application on one platform should be able to incorporate services from the other platforms. It is made possible via web services, but developing such web services is very complex.

Computing Performance

Data intensive applications on cloud requires high network bandwidth, which results in high cost. Low bandwidth does not meet the desired computing performance of cloud application.

Reliability and Availability

It is necessary for cloud systems to be reliable and robust because most of the businesses are now becoming dependent on services provided by third-party.