Three major threats to the cloud

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Editorial Staff.

As Mark Neider of Cbeyond (Nasdaq: CBEY) noted in a presentation at TMCNet’s ITEXPO earlier this month, cloud computing is gaining momentum and driving more bandwidth consumption as businesses large and small increasingly take advantage of the opportunities cloud provides. The biggest advantage, of course, is being able to purchase services once available only to enterprise-level companies–including business voice, back office and billing support, and data storage and security–at a very affordable rate.

But cloud services is still quite young–not in its infancy any longer, but perhaps headed for its terrible twos phase. And it faces some significant threats to its ability to grow. Here are three threats to cloud computing that businesses can’t afford to ignore…

1. Usage-based billing – Terry Hedden, founder and CEO of Infinity Technology Solutions (now Zeno Technology Solutions, as of Oct. 16) made a pretty bold statement during a cloud services panel at the MSPWorld Conference in Austin earlier this month. "Metered bandwidth could end this whole cloud game," he said. The shift from allowing customers to gulp as many gigabits of data as they need, to charging for that bandwidth past a certain amount, could drive small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) away from certain cloud services to more affordable options, some of which may be premise-based. Enterprises with more cash to spend might move certain core processes back to premise-based solutions–like on-premise PBX…

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