Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing for Businesses

This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for businesses. It examines the benefits of cost reduction, increased agility, and improved collaboration, while also highlighting the risks associated with security, data loss, and vendor dependence. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the key considerations for businesses considering adopting cloud computing technologies.

HI6008-Assignment 1
Advantages and Disadvantages
of Cloud Computing for
Businesses
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................2
2. Project Objective....................................................................................................................2
3. Project Scope..........................................................................................................................2
4. Literature Review...................................................................................................................3
5. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................9
6. Reference List......................................................................................................................10
7. Appendix..............................................................................................................................12
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1. Introduction
The primary aim of the project is to evaluate the advantages as well as the disadvantages of
using the cloud computing technology for the exaction of the business processes. There are
few of the crucial disadvantages as well as many of the significant advantages that will help n
utilizing the ideas of cloud computing in evaluating the desired requirements of the business
practices of a particular company. The paper highlights the literature presented by few of the
important researchers on the topic of cloud computing. Different researchers have presented
the matter in a different way, therefore, the complete analysis of the use of the cloud
computing technology is important for a particular consumer. The paper will help in
providing immense knowledge regarding the merits and demerits and the areas where the
efficient use of this technology can be done.
2. Project Objective
The objective of the project is as follows:
 To gain the vast amount of knowledge earring the advantages of cloud computing for
businesses
 To investigate regarding the disadvantages of cloud computing for business methods
 To gather information about the areas of risks that possess the greater risk of using
cloud computing
 To investigate regarding the solutions for risks
 To investigate the need for use of cloud computing
 To access customer satisfaction regarding its use
3. Project Scope
The scope of the project is that it will help in evaluating the everyday needs of executing a
particular business as well as will help in meeting the needs of the business requirements
throughout the competitive market segments. The projects help in providing complete
knowledge regarding the aspects that why the technology of cloud computing should be used
for the execution of the business operations. One of the crucial aspects for the consumers is to
understand the demerits of using this technology and safety for the files stored on the server
possess risks. Therefore, the user needs to come across each of the points mentioned in the
service agreement between the use and the company offering the cloud computing service.
The project retains many of the future scope related to the use of the cloud computing
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technology as it offers extra space to store the required data and applications and it can be
used effectively for the business purposes.
4. Literature Review
Advantages of cloud computing for businesses
The use of the cloud computing is considered as vital for the development and growth of a
particular organization. There are few of the crucial advantages of using cloud computing
within the concerned business segments. One of the advantages is that it does not require
ripping and replaced. They can easily run on the existing hardware infrastructures. Therefore,
the running of cloud computing enhances the overall performance of the organization on the
previously existing hardware (Avram, 2014). It becomes easy for the different business
organizations to switch from various traditional towards the cloud computing without up
gradation costs of the new infrastructures as they can run on the existing hardware. The
second advantage is that it helps in reducing the overall costs associated with the execution of
the concerned project (Hashem et al., 2015). The environment of the cloud computing
enables various business organizations to scale their storage as well as compute their
respective needs on the as-needed basis that keeps the costs process low. on the other hand,
the architecture of the cloud computing moves IT sending from the various capital expenses
to the operating expenses that makes it quite easy on the concerned books as well as simple in
getting justified (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The costs are directly aligned within the
concerned business usages and thus they can be easily predictable. The third advantage is that
the use of the automation provided agility towards the growth and development of the work
procedures. An agile business is considered as to be the successful business and the desired
agility is obtained from the higher levels of the automation. The primary motive of designing
the cloud computing technology is to get heavily automated as well as self-positioning which
provides the end-users the desired ability in order to quickly scale their needs up and down
without the help of any manual intervention. Different business processes have the desired
ability for responding more quickly to the demands proposed by the customers and this
improves their services as well as their responsiveness towards customer satisfaction.
Reaching the satisfaction level of the customers is of great importance as helps in evaluating
the significant growth of the firm throughout the concerned competitive market areas (Sadiku
et al., 2014). The use of the automation technology is mainly to boost the growth of the firm
by achieving the agile with the use of higher level of automation.
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The fourth advantage is that the applications are considered as to be portable in the execution
of the concerned business processes. When the designed are properly the technology of cloud
computing provides more benefits concerning the portable applications. The business
applications, as well as the data, can easily be moved from a various traditional infrastructure
of computing towards the cloud as well as back again without any type of difficulty,
providing businesses flexibility in using and managing their concerned applications along
with the data. When the applications are portable then they provide the best results
concerning both traditional as well as cloud environments (Gangwar et al., 2015). Moreover,
it helps in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of evaluating the business processes
throughout the concerned market segments. The fifth advantage is enabling the mobility for
the business methods. The use of the cloud computing provides the preferred ability to the
business processes for enabling the employees in order to provide access to the various
applications as well as data from different places (Botta et al., 2016). It also helps in getting
more productive results for the firm and enhances the overall performance too. The sixth
advantage of using the cloud computing technology is that it effectively focuses on the core
competencies for the organization.
The utilization of the cloud computing technology helps in providing significant results for
the evaluation of business performances for the concerned organization. There are different
organizations those are implementing latest innovative technologies in order to get the
desired competitive advantage over the other competitors within the market segments. The
use of the automation that is developed within the cloud computing requires less amount of
work on the section of IT and thus, the resources, as well as the budget, can be easily freed up
for focusing on the core competencies (González-Martínez et al., 2015). It is evident to know
that a particular business runs on IT but the management of the IT needs to easy as well as
streamlined in order to boost the growth of the firm. Cloud computing has been offering such
flexibility in reaching the overall services that are delivered to the concerned customers.
There are few of the advantages of cloud computing that helps in promoting the concerned
business process of any of the organization. One of the other advantages of using the cloud
computing is the enhancement of the security system as it boosts the overall growth of the
concerned organization. It helps in keeping the files as well as the application secured and
thus, the desired flexibility can be provided to the entire work processes (Shiau & Chau,
2016). It provides the business finite amount of focus in order to be divided among of all its
respective responsibilities. As compared with the hosting on a particular local server the
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amount of flexibility generated by cloud computing is found to be more. The use of the
improved freedom from the implementation of the cloud computing technology helps in
making the significant differences and enhances the overall efficiency of the concerned
organization.
On the other hand, it helps in offering the collaboration efficiency within the respective work
processes in the workplace. Collaboration provides the ability to the business for
communicating and sharing different from the concerned traditional methods. For example, if
a team is working on different location the use of this technology will provide elevation in
enhancing the business growth and will improve the efficiency of the project by making
effective communications and sharing along the employees or the team members. One of the
other significant advantages is to receive the automatic updates which are considered as to be
vital for the IT requirements (Ali et al., 2015). The system gets regular updates in order to
change it to the latest technology available. It has been seen that there are different types of
the costs involved in the execution of the business processes, especially in transferring and
storing of the data safely. Thus, the major advent of using the cloud computing technology is
that it effectively reduces the desired cost of getting upgrades and the new hardware, as well
as software services, are efficiently added to the system which improves the overall
performance of the organization. There exist no other expenses for hiring any other staff
members in order to execute the data stored. Furthermore, it helps in reducing the energy
consumption and the costs can be significantly reduced. Enhancing the flexibility and
reliability of the users is important and the use of this technology will help in attracting a
large number of the consumers towards it. The use of the cloud computing technology has
become viable business model chain for a large number of the companies like Amazon which
had assembled the huge amount of the servers as well as resources for handling their
respective customers demand during the respective peak season. There are three different
types of the cloud computing such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (Marinescu, 2017). Few of the
famous clod service providers are Amazon, Zoho, Google, and Salesforce.
Disadvantages of cloud computing for businesses
There are few of the crucial disadvantages of using the cloud computing technology. There
are different security standards are implemented by various cloud service providers in order
to keep the data and applications safe. There are various industry certifications too
implemented in order to ensure that the respective cloud environment is safe. On the other
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hand, the storing data and other files take towards few of the crucial risks such as data loss or
the theft, data leakage or the account or the service hijacking. Many of the times it has been
seen that there exist potential risks for the hacking of the various accounts and thus the
development of the efficient security systems are of great importance. Some of the risks
associated with the insecure interfaces as well as the APIs (Gutierrez et al., 2015). The denial
of the service attacks significantly affects the use of the cloud computing services and can
affect the files stored on the servers too. There are few of the technical vulnerabilities,
mostly on the shared environments that also generates great impact on the execution of the
business processes to a large extent. The level of the security systems ache vied as well as
maintained generally varies for different cloud service providers. It is important of selecting
the service providers carefully as it needs to be selected that is more stable, reliable as well as
reliable and offers reasonable terms and condition of the services. Moreover, one of the
potential disadvantages is the clod downtime which refers to the technical issues that come
with the execution of the cloud computing services to the concerned customers. There are
crucial technical problems such as reboots, networks outages as well as the downtime. These
particular vents can effectively incapacitate the concerned business operations along with the
business processes and can damage the entire business methods (Rahimi et al., 2014). It is
important for any of the firms to come up with the suitable strategies in order to minimize the
impact of the downtime that is created on the evaluation of the business operations. The next
disadvantage is the limited control towards the execution of the business processes. The firms
offering the cloud computing services owns as well as manages and monitors the entire cloud
infrastructure.
As being the customers there exists very less control over the use and access of the cloud
computing services. The consumers can get access to their stored data as well as the other
files but they cannot have the administrative task access like that of updating and managing
the firmware or getting access to the server shell. The other disadvantages include the
corruption of the data or the threat to the safety of the data stored. It has been seen that while
the data has been stored online thee exists crucial risks that the data may be lost due to
hacking or by getting corrupted or getting infected by various viruses (Ahmed et al., 2015).
Few of the risks critically reflect that the loss or the damaging of the data that can be caused
by the administrator or the employees of the concerned company. Next is the unauthorized
access or the disclosure that sometimes affects the storing of the data online. Furthermore, the
various types of the malicious activities that target the respective service providers like
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hacking or the viruses may cause issues to the files stored on the server (Whaiduzzaman et
al., 2014). On the other hand, there are fewer of the poor security practices that comprise
with the data protection measures and lowers down the safety effectiveness for the data and
applications. Carrying out of the risk assessment measures are of great importance as it helps
in making the users aware of the features and benefits that the user will receive. Under the
laws of the data protection laws, the customer using the cloud computing services is referred
to the data controller (Jo et al., 2015). Being the data controller, it becomes evident for the
consumer to ensure few of the crucial aspects such as any of the processed data over the
server is fully secured, data is not transferred to someone else without getting permission firm
the concerned user or it should not get outside of the destination country (Ahmed et al.,
2015). There should be the higher level of security to the files stored and accessed
throughout the cloud computing.
There are different levels of the data protection and it becomes vital to identify what is the
best level in order to keep the data as well as file safe on the cloud servers. It has been seen
that the different service providers offer the wide range of the data protection system that
operates as well as usually host all the respective requirements of the server that are needed to
run the services of cloud computing. This particular system consists of the database
management systems mainly for the applications that are data-intensive like that of the
required for the e-commerce technology or for managing the customer relationships. High
levels of the data protection are supposed to be essential as o keep the data safe. One of the
other ways to get ensured is to check the service level agreement that is made between the
consumer and the company (Stergiou et al., 12018). One of the other disadvantages of using
the cloud computing technology within the execution of the business methods is that
organizational changes are required for adaptation of this newer technology. The proper
amount of coaching needs to be provided to the team members as to execute the entire
processes. Next is the issues that come while managing the relationships with the vendor and
it sometimes creates issues like the technical difficulties. There exists the lesser amount of
control of the users over the business and there always exists the risks that it may be accessed
by the administrator which can affect the files significantly in various ways. If some data got
spread on the internet by hacking or by some other then what will be the consequences then
who will solve the entire matter (Yannuzzi et al., 2014). Thus, there needs to be a superior
development of the agreement following all of these points in order to enhance the security
and satisfaction level of the customers regarding the using of these services.
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The retaining of the legal, privacy and the security compliances are considered as ta be
difficult for the cloud service provider. One of the issues is that it can negatively affect the
performances of the applications. The requirement of the internet connect is mandatory and it
can be taken as a disadvantage as in case of technical issues with the internet connection thee
will no access to the cloud computing services (Firdhous et al., 2014). Therefore, it is vital for
the various companies offering the cloud computing services to look at this matter and
develop some effective strategies so that the access can be provided in absence of the internet
connection. It requires data backup on the secure server and thus, there is the requirement of
continuous up gradation of the servers with the use of the latest technologies in order to
maintain the effectiveness in keeping the safe. The cloud services offered by a various
organization can offer various types of features and it has been found to be slow in few of the
areas (Choi et al., 2014). The limitation of the storage is one of the demerits and in order to
get more space there requires more amount to be paid, thus it is not considered as to be cost-
efficient all the times.
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5. Conclusion
The paper effectively brings out the facts associated with the use and accessing of the cloud
computing technology. There are few of the crucial disadvantages as well as several
advantages of this technology that can be helpful in executing the business practices of many
of the organizations. There are many of the excellent features of cloud computing for
improving the business actions of an organization. One of the significant advantages is that it
helps in improving the competence and usefulness of evaluating the business processes all
over the concerned market segments. There are fewer organizations those are implementing
latest inventive technologies in order to get the preferred viable advantage over the other
contestants within the market segments. Some of the disadvantages reflect its limited control
towards the implementation of the trade processes. Moreover it's poor safety practices that
encompass the data security measures and lowers down the security efficiency of the data and
applications. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that the user needs to identify the
usefulness and risky areas of using this technology that can generate crucial impact on
running the business of the respective organization.
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6. Reference List
Ahmed, E., Gani, A., Khan, M. K., Buyya, R., & Khan, S. U. (2015). Seamless application
execution in mobile cloud computing: Motivation, taxonomy, and open
challenges. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 52, 154-172.
Ahmed, E., Gani, A., Sookhak, M., Ab Hamid, S. H., & Xia, F. (2015). Application
optimization in mobile cloud computing: Motivation, taxonomies, and open
challenges. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 52, 52-68.
Ali, M., Khan, S. U., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2015). Security in cloud computing: Opportunities
and challenges. Information sciences, 305, 357-383.
Avram, M. G. (2014). Advantages and challenges of adopting cloud computing from an
enterprise perspective. Procedia Technology, 12, 529-534.
Botta, A., De Donato, W., Persico, V., & Pescapé, A. (2016). Integration of cloud computing
and internet of things: a survey. Future Generation Computer Systems, 56, 684-700.
Choi, C., Choi, J., & Kim, P. (2014). Ontology-based access control model for security policy
reasoning in cloud computing. The Journal of Supercomputing, 67(3), 711-722.
Firdhous, M., Ghazali, O., & Hassan, S. (2014). Fog computing: Will it be the future of cloud
computing?. The Third International Conference on Informatics & Applications
(ICIA2014).
Gangwar, H., Date, H., & Ramaswamy, R. (2015). Understanding determinants of cloud
computing adoption using an integrated TAM-TOE model. Journal of Enterprise
Information Management, 28(1), 107-130.
González-Martínez, J. A., Bote-Lorenzo, M. L., Gómez-Sánchez, E., & Cano-Parra, R.
(2015). Cloud computing and education: A state-of-the-art survey. Computers &
Education, 80, 132-151.
Gutierrez, A., Boukrami, E., & Lumsden, R. (2015). Technological, organizational and
environmental factors influencing managers' decision to adopt cloud computing in the
UK. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, 28(6), 788-807.
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Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The
rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information
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Jo, M., Maksymyuk, T., Strykhalyuk, B., & Cho, C. H. (2015). Device-to-device-based
heterogeneous radio access network architecture for mobile cloud computing. IEEE
Wireless Communications, 22(3), 50-58.
Marinescu, D. C. (2017). Cloud computing: theory and practice. Morgan Kaufmann.
Rahimi, M. R., Ren, J., Liu, C. H., Vasilakos, A. V., & Venkatasubramanian, N. (2014).
Mobile cloud computing: A survey, state of art and future directions. Mobile
Networks and Applications, 19(2), 133-143.
Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation,
management, and security. CRC press.
Sadiku, M. N., Musa, S. M., & Momoh, O. D. (2014). Cloud computing: opportunities and
challenges. IEEE Potentials, 33(1), 34-36.
Shiau, W. L., & Chau, P. Y. (2016). Understanding behavioral intention to use a cloud
computing classroom: A multiple model comparison approach. Information &
Management, 53(3), 355-365.
Stergiou, C., Psannis, K. E., Kim, B. G., & Gupta, B. (2018). Secure integration of IoT and
cloud computing. Future Generation Computer Systems, 78, 964-975.
Whaiduzzaman, M., Sookhak, M., Gani, A., & Buyya, R. (2014). A survey on vehicular
cloud computing. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 40, 325-344.
Yannuzzi, M., Milito, R., Serral-Gracià, R., Montero, D., & Nemirovsky, M. (2014,
December). Key ingredients in an IoT recipe: Fog Computing, Cloud computing, and
more Fog Computing. In Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication
Links and Networks (CAMAD), 2014 IEEE 19th International Workshop on (pp. 325-
329). IEEE.
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7. Appendix
Figure: People Using Cloud Computing
Figure: Various features of cloud computing
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Figure: Types of cloud computing
Figure: Advantages of cloud computing
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