Enterprise organizations are bombarded daily with the myriad reasons to deploy their line of business applications in the cloud. Efficiency, flexibility, cost savings, agility – and the list goes on and on – are just some of the benefits exhorted by cloud computing supporters. And industry analyst firms such as Gartner believe these various benefits will help drive spending on cloud services to $210 billion in 2016 [1].
By all accounts, the future of cloud computing is anything by cloudy. Unfortunately, that assessment doesn’t paint a complete picture of everything impacting cloud adoption at the enterprise level. High-profile outages at several different cloud providers have led some to question whether or not the cloud is reliable enough to trust to “important” applications. The typical argument goes something like this: “The Internet is great, but it wasn’t really designed for business use. I need to be really careful about what kinds of applications I put in the public cloud. In other words, it’s okay if email is out for a couple of hours, but we certainly couldn’t endure extended downtime if our supplier portal was inaccessible.”