Enterprise

from gigaom…. To summarise,

1. It’s not secure. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re legally obligated to or because they’re super paranoid.
2. It can’t be logged, required for compliance purposes.
3. It’s not platform agnostic. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
4. Reliability is still an issue. Even inside an enterprise, data centers or servers go down, but generally the communication around such outages is better and in many cases, fail-over options exist.
5. Portability isn’t seamless. The so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, so getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like. The platform issues (above) can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and there are bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
6. It’s not environmentally sustainable. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, the emergence of cloud computing isn’t as ethereal as it might seem. Moving data center operations to the cloud and off corporate balance sheets is kind of like chucking your garbage into a landfill rather than your yard; The problem is still there but you no longer have to look at it.
7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. The data still resides on servers somewhere, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws. For example, Canada is concerned about its public sector projects being hosted on U.S.-based servers because under the U.S. Patriot Act, it could be accessed by the U.S. government.
8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms, but data in the cloud means problems with latency inherent in transmitting data across the country or globe.
9. Large companies already have an internal cloud. Many big firms have internal IT shops that act as a cloud to the multiple divisions under the corporate umbrella. Not only do these internal shops have the benefit of being within company firewalls, but they generally work hard — from a cost perspective — to stay competitive with outside cloud resources, making the case for sending computing to the cloud weak.
10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans. Big companies are conservative, and transitions in computing can take years to implement. A good example is the challenge HP faced when trying to consolidate its data center operations.