The Top 5 Misconceptions About The Cloud

We've heard it before. "Serverless? That can't possibly be secure." Despite its decade-long road to prominence,  Cloud Computing remains confusing or intimidating in the technology field; many of us hold onto misconceptions about The Cloud, and could be holding back progress and growth for businesses across markets.

Misconceptions About The Cloud From Marc Reed, an Experienced Developer at Intraprise

Misconception: "It's not true that Cloud is cheaper. It's actually more expensive!"  

It is true that businesses can be burned by Cloud Computing costs - when corporations fail to take advantage of built-in protections against things like DDOS, or attempt to shoehorn in legacy technologies that don't fit well into Cloud Computing models, the Cloud becomes expensive, riddled with wasted costs and missed opportunities. 

We have to remember that Cloud Computing costs are tied to "compute time," so a Cloud Computing model should be built to economize processing time; simply transferring existing systems to the Cloud does not guarantee efficiency. Wasteful, inefficient processes are the enemy of a sound Cloud strategy.

Misconception: "AWS has had major outages so it's not as 'highly available' as they say!"

Yes it's true that even AWS has outages. But, in that event, the services most impacted are those that do NOT take advantage of the AWS global infrastructure.  If your Cloud strategy makes use of multiple Availability Zones, your service can continue to operate even when some locations experience outages.

Misconception: "Serverless Models pose serious security concerns"

I once had a boss who rejected the notion of "serverless" based solely on its name.  Like many people who dismiss a serverless approach, it was a knee-jerk response to a foreign concept, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the word.  

The boss I mentioned above would cite “serious security concerns” as a reason to dismiss the discussion as soon as it arose. But if done right, a serverless model has far fewer attack vectors than traditional web servers, which hackers have decades of experience exploiting.  To prove my point, I prototyped a serverless alternative to our existing 'LAMP stack' architecture and allowed our Security Team to perform penetration tests on it.  It performed far better than our existing architecture, then went on to replace it completely.

Misconception: "Enterprises are moving away from The Cloud"

Recently I heard a developer friend tell me "Enterprises are now scaling back their Cloud strategies."  While this may be true of a few enterprises who have been burned by poorly implemented Cloud strategies, it's realistically just wishful thinking by ‘Cloud haters.’  Since its inception, Cloud adoption has seen staggering growth with no sign of slowing down.

Misconception: "Cloud Adoption supports all applications seamlessly"  

This is not true, but is also not ‘anti-Cloud.’  If your enterprise uses an older tech stack, certain elements will almost certainly need to be redesigned and rewritten.  There are almost certainly going to be up-front costs associated with a Cloud migration strategy, to fully realize the long-term benefits.  No Cloud platform I know of has a single button you can push to migrate to the Cloud.  It requires different thinking that will almost certainly meet resistance from members of your tech staff. Change is difficult, but the transition to the Cloud is worth the effort. 

Optimize Your Cloud Strategy

Want to dive into how your business could better utilize the Cloud? Intraprise can help. Get in touch with an expert at Intraprise! Still need more info before you take the leap? Read our Cloud eBook for more on the Cloud.