Why Cloud Computing Implementations Typically Fail

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Jeff Fleece.

The ladder to the cloud is missing a few rungs. At least, that is the conclusion of 276 IT professionals recently polled in a survey commissioned by Sungard Availability Services*. In the survey, the top three reasons indicated for why cloud computing implementations fail were:

• lack of understanding of cloud security and compliance (indicated by 56% of respondents)
• lack of clearly-identified business objectives for migrating to the cloud (55%)
• lack of planning (42%)

Those are three gaping holes in the ladder to a successful cloud implementation, and I believe that mistaken beliefs are at the core of each one…

Mistake #1: The cloud is different from other information technology. 
“The cloud” sounds so nebulous. How do you secure something you can’t see or touch? How can you wrap compliance around something so ambiguous? How can regulations be applied to virtual machines?

Stop. The cloud is still based on hardware and application infrastructure – all the stuff IT people have worked with for decades. For a successful cloud implementation, you just need to do something you’ve probably done a dozen times before: create a strong, well-defined roles and responsibilities matrix around all the different security aspects that are in effect in the cloud. This might include who protects data at rest and data in motion, and who handles security at the network, application, storage, and compute levels. Take away the word “cloud” and this becomes familiar territory for IT – and should be treated as such…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/2910026/cloud-computing/why-cloud-computing-implementations-typically-fail.html