Eight cloud computing risks, and how to quash them

A series of 'what-if' scenarios for what could go wrong with cloud, developed by The Open Group.

What could go wrong with cloud?  Let’s count the ways….

In their latest book, Cloud Computing for Business, Dr. Chris Harding and his team of co-authors affiliated with The Open Group — a key standards body for enterprise architecture — detail some of the key risk areas that need to be looked at with any cloud project:

Risk #1: The solution may not meet its financial objectives: Do your short-term and long-term ROI work. The key factors to consider when assessing cloud ROI risk probability include utilization, speed, scale, and quality. “These factors are built into most ROI models, and affect the headline figures for investment,
revenue, cost, and time to return.”

Risk # 2: The solution may not work in the context of the user enterprise’s organization and culture: Always a biggie. The best way to address is having “a clear executive vision and direction for business transformation,” which includes top-level executive support. (Easier said than done, right?) This should include the establishment of “a clear roadmap for procurement or implementation of cloud services and applications that use them, and coordination of stakeholders and competing strategies to get consensus for storage, computing, network and applications to avoid islands of demand usage.” Always start with pilots to create confidence and “build buy-in and usage in the user  community for cloud services.”