Cloud technology has become very pervasive, with 89 percent of organizations globally identifying it as part of their IT strategies while another 75 percent say they have already implemented at least one cloud application. Some of the key benefits enjoyed by organizations that adopt cloud technology include lower costs, faster time-to-market, improved reliability, and better business intelligence insights, among others.

In spite of the rise in usage, there is still a significant amount of concern and push-back for any potential new cloud-based solution. These include security concerns, integration challenges, industry standards compliance issues, information governance, and difficulty in measuring the real economic value of cloud solutions. In many cases, however, organizations often think these challenges are much bigger than they really are.

Cloud Adoption Concerns (And How To Overcome Them)

Here are five of the most common cloud adoption challenges and how to overcome them:

1. Security Concerns

Problem: Although security is becoming less of a concern for cloud adoption, there are still those who believe that data stored in the cloud is inherently less secure than on-prem data storage.

Solution: Your approach to security for your cloud workloads should not be that different from how you approach security for your on-premises workloads. Develop overarching security policies that are based on your particular needs within your organization, then use these as yardsticks to evaluate different cloud solution providers. Major cloud providers such as better than what a small or mid-sized organization can develop internally.

2. Integration with Existing Systems

Problem: It’s rare to migrate all of an organization’s infrastructure to the cloud at once, so there is naturally some concern over how migrated cloud applications will integrate with existing on-prem systems.

Solution: While cloud vendors were initially known for pushing an “all-cloud” approach, the industry has shifted to now support and adopt a hybrid on-prem/cloud model as the default architecture. As part of that shift, the major cloud vendors have made the process of integrating from on-prem to cloud (and cloud to cloud) much easier, through APIs, specialized integration frameworks, and hybrid authentication architectures.

3. Cost Concerns

Problem: Making a long-term commitment for services (rather than one-time hardware purchases) means that we’re locked in to a monthly subscription fee. It’s harder to predict what we’ll spend.

Solution: Organizations need to understand that transition and implementation costs are not unique to the cloud. You need to treat your cloud implementation just like you would a normal IT project regardless of whether it’s SaaS, IaaS or PaaS.

Remember that running your own data center isn’t a one-time capital investment. Servers and supporting equipment have ongoing costs as well, including electricity, cooling, physical security, and labor costs to install, maintain, and upgrade the hardware. Cloud models typically involve smaller one-time capital expenditures than on-premises models, but this model also allows you to scale up your architecture needs (and costs) as your business to grows. The cloud pricing model means you’re paying what you need today, without overbuying to anticipate what you might need tomorrow.

4. Concerns About Loss of Control

Problem: Organizations with on-prem systems often feel they are giving up too much control to cloud providers, surrendering the ability to define granular settings for system resources, networking, and security.

Solution: The cloud isn’t just one thing. One of the best analogies of the different cloud offerings is the pizza-as-a-service model. You can make your own pizza at home, buy a take-and-bake pizza, have a pie delivered, or go out to eat at a pizza place. These different services, much like cloud architectures, allow you to pick the level of service that meets your needs. For workloads that require the organization to have more granular control over how the application runs, the IaaS model makes it possible to migrate to a virtual machine in the cloud without giving up the ability to configure the machine environment, storage, etc. For other workloads requiring less hands-on configuration, using a managed PaaS model makes more sense.

5. Legal and Compliance Concerns

Problem: A common challenge to cloud adoption is that it may not meet compliance or regulatory demands.

Solution: The major cloud vendors are certified for use for most any regulated domain of data. Further, most vendors allow you to specify the geographic region(s) in which your application and data will be stored, thus eliminating the concern of violating geographic boundaries of compliance or regulation.

Conclusion

With cloud architecture becoming more and more common, most of the classic objections to migrating to the cloud no longer hold water. Security, integration, and compliance used to be blockers to cloud adoption, but the platforms have matured to the point that these are no longer barriers.