Is using cloud still a decision that you have to make, or is it business-as-usual by now? While statistics show the majority of businesses are using cloud, with many using multiple cloud providers, there are still good reasons for keeping some applications in-house.

Reasons to Stay Out of the Cloud

Even if you’ve committed to cloud for most of your workloads, you should still review every workload and every new project to determine if the best place for it is the cloud or your data center. Some reasons you might want an application to stay on premises include:

Security

Everyone knows by now that cloud is not necessarily less secure than company-managed data centers. Nevertheless, the fact remains that cloud is a shared environment, accessible over the internet, and default configuration settings do not always result in secure infrastructure. It is still reasonable to decide to keep sensitive information inside your data center where you have tighter control over who can access it.

Legacy

Any existing application in your data center was probably designed before cloud was a standard IT technology. These applications weren’t designed using a service-oriented architecture, they may make assumptions about their configuration, and they usually can’t easily scale horizontally. Because of these limitations, they aren’t able to get many of the benefits of cloud. It’s often not worth the effort to port them to cloud, especially if their retirement date is known.

Cost management

Sometimes keeping costs stable is more important than finding the absolute lowest price. While cloud is generally low cost, spending will vary along with usage. It’s true cloud makes it easy to handle spikes in demand, but your costs may spike as well.

Performance

Because cloud is a shared environment, the performance you experience depends not just on how heavily your resources are being used but also how all the other cloud customers are using their resources. It is possible to create a high performance computing environment in the cloud, but you may prefer to keep those applications in your own data center where you can control load more easily.

Criticality

If you have a business-critical application in the cloud, you’ll feel a major business impact if there’s a cloud outage. While cloud offers high availability, outages are not uncommon. You can have outages in your data center, too, but you’re typically immediately aware of that and can take steps to recover rapidly. When the application is in the cloud, recovery depends entirely on the cloud provider.

These considerations don’t mean avoiding cloud entirely. They just mean that cloud isn’t a decision you make once. It’s a decision you make over and over, every time you consider the best deployment strategy for a new workload. Contact Prescient Solutions to get help making that decision and supporting your cloud infrastructure with cloud services.