1. Pricing (38 per cent)
The top challenge unearthed in the survey indicated that while cost savings may be a key benefit of cloud, current pricing models under which they operate are difficult to understand. Organisations therefore need to carefully analyse pricing models and their own IT needs before they commit.2. Performance (38 per cent)
Different clouds are architected with different back ends, and some are more susceptible to ?noisy neighbour? syndrome than others. For organisations sensitive to variations in performance this can impact the cloud experience.3. Support (36 per cent)
The realities of cloud support contracts often take companies by surprise. Simple email or ticketing support may only be available to organisations at lower tiers. Companies purchasing higher-end support may still have difficulties getting access to adequate levels of hands-on expertise. Poor or overly expensive support can become a grating factor limiting cloud success.4. Downtime (35 per cent)
Though many perceive cloud to be immunised from outages, the reality is that failure does happen. It?s important to understand service level agreements and business continuity options.5. Management of cloud services (33 per cent)
Just like on-premise systems, cloud services require IT management. However, many cloud vendors focus on technology innovation instead of simplifying cloud service management. The cloud is a new platform to most IT shops and it can take some time to learn.6. Scalability (33 per cent)
A top promise of cloud is scalability, as it is supposed to allow teams to scale up to meet demand and scale down when the peek has passed. However, most companies experience real challenges both in scaling individual workloads and scaling their entire footprint. Knowing when and how to scale is not always straightforward ? especially because some vendors require an environment to be shut down and moved in order to get the job done. Dante Orsini is SVP of Business Development at iland.Share this story