10 Major Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing [Pros & Cons]

Storing important data on any device is not only an expensive but also space consuming task. But such tasks have been negotiated with the help of cloud computing. The Cloud computing manages, maintains, and backs up data remotely. It allows users to store data online which will help them to access it anytime anywhere through the Internet. Along with the large scale businesses small scale businesses also are turning towards cloud computing. We will discuss more Cloud computing and their advantages/disadvantages in this post.

Pros and cons of cloud computing —
People used to search; what are the disadvantages of cloud computing? What is the impact of cloud computing technology on the businesses world? What are the advantages of cloud computing? Which of two major advantages of using cloud storage on digital world? Impact of disadvantages of cloud storage? And so on.

What is cloud computing? — it is a network of remotely hosted servers to access all your data instead of local storage. Cloud computing now has become an important aspect of daily life. But everything has two sides, positive and negative. So how can cloud computing be exceptional? Along with some solid advantages, it bears some disadvantages also. While using any application everyone needs to check both sides (positive and negative). And this is the reason I am enlisting here the advantages and the disadvantages of cloud computing.

Advantages, Disadvantages, Pros, and Cons of Cloud Computing

Now, we will discuss a few advantages and disadvantages of using Cloud Computing.

Check out the most important advantages as well as the negative effects of Cloud Computing:

ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING:

1. Cost effective.

Every business emphasizes keeping the expenses at the lowest. This is also one way to increase profits. Cloud computing helps businesses to reduce their expenses or operational costs they need to spend on data storage. It is a money saver and also saves the resources of the businesses as well. It lets businesses to spend nothing on in-house server storage and apps requirements. As it's an Internet-based technology, businesses don't need to have a premise or a disc to store data. As a result of this, you don't have to spend on corresponding operational costs like power consumption, administration, maintenance, air conditioning, etc.

You don't have to worry about the invested capital also because there is no as such invested capital. You have to pay for what you have used and you are free to leave anytime. It provides with huge storage space at only about 3 cents per gigabyte. It is being said that, only large scale businesses can afford to have the cloud but the real fact seems to be completely different as the cloud offers cost-effective services for small scale businesses also.

Check out; Top 7 Best Cloud Storage Services For Backing up Your Data

2. Reliability.

This is what everyone needs from their service providers to keep things going continuously whenever there is something wrong with the system. Cloud computing comes true when it comes to reliability and consistency as compared to in-house IT infrastructure. They came up with a support/assistance team and will always help you out if something goes wrong.

Most of the cloud service providers offer 99.99 % availability all 365 days with guaranteed 24x7 assistance and this is with a Service Level Agreement (SLAs). In the case of host server failure, hosted files and services can be easily transferred to other available servers. This way, your work won't be affected and you may continue with all your tasks smoothly.

3. Manageability.

With the help of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), service provider assures a timely, guaranteed and uninterrupted delivery of the services. They also look after all the maintenance and management of the IT services. Due to this reason, cloud computing puts an end to the necessity of IT infrastructure updates and maintenance.

Cloud computing gives you upgraded and facilitated IT management and maintenance. Installation isn't required to use the software, applications, and services. You have access to a simple Web-based user interface without installation of any infrastructure.

4. Awesome accessibility.

Cloud computing gives you the freedom to access the data stored in it anywhere anytime without the use of any machine. That makes this technology highly flexible and accessible in today's time.

To give you an example of iCloud storage, as you might already aware of that, this is kind of online storage drive which can be used to store all your data. You will then access it anytime/anywhere from the cloud storage. So, accessibility is one of the major advantages of cloud computing.

5. Back-up and restore.

It is quite a bit time-consuming process to recover the data stored in the on-premise system. But cloud computing offers a faster and easier recovery of backed up data. Cloud Disaster Recovery also known as Cloud DR is a strategy for backup and restore which involves storing and maintaining copies of records stored electronically in a cloud computing environment.

The primary motive of Cloud DR is to provide a way to recover data and/or implement failover towards the organization in case something is broken. And thus, effective cloud disaster recovery program provides continuity for the services.

6. Freedom to add and eliminate.

You don't have to waste your money on the services which you are not using. You know that the workload is not the same every single day. Whenever there is a low workload, you might think of the resources and services being wasted.

But in Cloud computing, it gives you the freedom to add and eliminate the resources and services as per your requirement. So your payment won't be wasted for unused services. This way you will pay for only those services which are being used by you and not for those services which aren't.

DISADVANTAGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING:

Now, having such excellent advantaged, it has some disadvantages as well. We will see what are these in details:

1. Security concern.

Though the cloud service providers offer the best security standards and certifications, it is also liable to be attacked as the data is stored online in the cloud. This is because, when you use cloud services, you have to allow the service providers to access all your data, even confidential and important data also. It's like to hand over the data to a third party.

So there is always a risk of your information may get stolen. That involves a high risk to store confidential and important data online. Even the best businesses also have undergone such kind of security breach.

2. Downtime.

As the cloud service providers handle more clients every day, they can be like overrun. There might be some technical outages also which can happen because of different reasons like a breakdown of electricity, Internet connectivity is on the lower side, etc.

Due to these outages, it would be impossible to access your applications or data from the cloud and this may lead to a temporary suspension of your business services. You have to hold all your work unless downtime if lifted.

3. Vendor lock-in.

As a reason being the difference in cloud platforms while switching from one cloud platform to another, the cloud service providers might suffer some severe challenges. The businesses have found some support issues, configuration issues, problems in interoperability and extra charges while hosting and running applications of their current cloud platform over some other platforms.

So as to simplify this, the applications made on Microsoft framework might get trouble to access on Linux platform. There is also a potential risk that you might lose the data as a result of the compromises done at the time of switching.

4. Limited control.

As the cloud services are entirely managed, owned, that is controlled by service providers, it leaves minimum control to the customers. The customers are only able to manage and control the applications and services run on top of that and not the back-end services.

The key administrative services like server shell access, firmware management may not be accessed by the final users.

Bottom Line

It is always a better option to focus on the advantages that the things you use the offer. Looking at the disadvantages of cloud computing, it's advantages surpasses disadvantages. It's cost effectivity, reduced Downtime and minimum efforts on management tell the story that how useful it is.