by David Gracey
Your boss is clamoring for you to get to the cloud. But before you take off too quickly, consider these four hidden costs of cloud migration from a study by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association.
- Incurring Unexpected Expenses For Initial Systems Migration
Lesser known migration fees include the costs of recoding apps to work in a virtualized environment, reformatting data to sync with your SaaS provider, organizing federated identity and access management, and developing cloud-management processes. Anticipate all areas of impact so that these costs don’t surprise you! - Bringing Services Back In-House Due To Regulatory Change
The cloud might become impractical if the government sets stricter data privacy rules or mandates more rigorous compliance. This may require a company to remove data from the cloud, account for its accuracy; shred or sanitize cloud storage data; configure in-house systems to replace cloud services; pay early termination penalties; re-apportion IT resources to support services being reverted; or buy physical resources to host services being returned. The list of potential expenses goes on and on! - Implementing Countermeasures To Mitigate Risk
Companies may have to purchase data encryption tools, plan and test mitigation strategies as well as maintain off-line backups and auditing logs. When someone leaves the company, you don’t want an outsider to have access to your entire system! - Using Lock-In Cloud Models May Thwart Open-Standard Adoption
Locking in to a particular cloud provider or proprietary service model may impede future adoption of open standards-based services. Make sure you can cancel your contract without paying a huge fee!
You may want to check out one of the blogs I wrote at the first of the year on Cloud Computing in Medical and in Legal. Also, I discuss Cloud in this radio interview (fast forward to the 8:15 mark; the Cloud discussion lasts 5 minutes).
