ITE 221 - Fall 2011 - Chapter 13

Article Review “Moving to the cloud in 2012? Look out for these pitfalls”

By Nancy Gohring, Dec 16, 2011

Posted on Info World at http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/moving-the-cloud-in-2012-look-out-these-pitfalls-181773

In this article industry experts discuss some of the most common mistakes when moving to the cloud.

Failure to set up redundancies for disaster scenarios. John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, pointed out that developers, "often assume that the cloud service takes care of security, application availability, backup and recovery, and ensuring service performance."

Not planning for data center failures. Many cloud users don’t design their systems to ensure they are load balanced and can shift workloads to different zones in the event of an outage.

Failing to accommodate for potential bandwidth issues. Joshua McKenty, CEO of Piston Cloud, noted, "We will continue to see problematic issues with public cloud bandwidth limitations.” Many companies simply switch to private clouds rather than search for other options.

Vendor Lock-in – Engates hoptes to see “more progress toward a de facto standard.” In the coming year, HP, Dell and Rackspace plan to launch their OpenStack-based cloud services for this purpose. The goal of OpenStack is to Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement .