Providers must address top cloud computing issues to succeed in 2013

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Saad Shahzad.

In addition to the legions of cloud provider startups carving out their places in market, major technology companies such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Google and Apple have also made a big push into cloud services. But after so many high-profile blunders last year, providers have to overcome customers’ concerns to gain mainstream traction in 2013.

Apple’s iCloud has had its share of problems, for example, and even cloud provider giants such as Amazon have struggled to ensure uptime for their cloud services, causing big customers such as Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest to suffer outages. Amazon had a particularly tough year in 2012 with a number of cloud failures, some even causing permanent data loss to its customers. To find out whether the cloud market can still succeed in light of such major missteps, we have to take a deeper look into some cloud computing issues getting in the way of adoption…

Downtime expectations and SLAs
Cloud providers have to get customers more comfortable with downtime. Inevitably, there will be some downtime in the cloud (at least for the foreseeable future), but the truth is that customers experience downtime in their on-premises environments as well. Cloud providers have to better manage expectations and have service-level agreements (SLAs) in place to provide service credits for customers that do experience downtime. However, monetary compensation for the monthly invoice might not be enough. Will cloud providers ever cover potential business loss? We have yet to come across one that does…

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