Be Cloud First not ‘Cloud Only’

Cloud Providers offer un-questionable promising freedom to organizations and engineers to quickly instrument on ideas. Adoption and Monetization from the offered ideas are key success factors for organizations. Cloud Services provide the platform to achieve those goals efficiently and help organizations stay competitive in business. We are all in agreement so far, but problem starts right after this! Cloud got its share of applause and evangelist wears the winners cap, but we forget the fact that this left system, data and accesses exposed to public cloud.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a good example of how SaaS platforms can get exploited by rogue intentions. Adoption and Monetization should follow investment on migrating the systems back to secure established infrastructure and limit public cloud usage as HA stack. Counter argument to this would be that same risk is involved with hosting in data center, that is correct but there is a difference between hosting a data and compute in multi-tenant SaaS Cloud Provider environment and dedicated data center environment. Using Storage and Compute of Cloud providers is a smart move but relying on managed services with no backup in-house solution is like putting your business to risk.

It is just waiting for one disaster when organizations would regret there cloud adoptions with “Cloud First” initiatives hosting various systems in cloud, failed to follow up on implementing parallel data center stack making it “Cloud Only”. Responsible and thoughtful Cloud providers are those who have foresight and are working towards tooling infrastructure enabling easy migration of tenants to dedicated environment’s as requested.