It is a rapidly evolving technology capable of delivering extensible services efficiently, supporting a wide range of applications from personal storage solutions to enterprise-level systems.
Privacy concerns remain a primary issue, as users often lose direct control over their data once it is stored on servers owned and managed by cloud providers.
Service agreements and shared responsibility models define the boundaries of control and accountability between the cloud provider and the customer, but misunderstandings or mismanagement in these areas can still result in security breaches or accidental data loss.
Automated management and remediation processes, supported by tools such as AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Operations Suite, help detect and respond to large-scale failures.
Additionally, companies prioritizing global accessibility, remote workforce enablement, disaster recovery, and leveraging advanced services such as AI/ML and analytics are well-suited for the cloud.
In recent years, some cloud providers have started offering specialized services for high-performance computing and low-latency applications, addressing some use cases previously exclusive to on-premises setups.
[4][5][6][7] On the other hand, organizations with strict regulatory requirements, highly predictable workloads, or reliance on deeply integrated legacy systems may find cloud infrastructure less suitable.
Additionally, companies with ultra-low latency requirements, such as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, rely on custom hardware (e.g., FPGAs) and physical proximity to exchanges, which most cloud providers cannot fully replicate despite recent advancements.
Similarly, tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon build their own data centers due to economies of scale, predictable workloads, and the ability to customize hardware and network infrastructure for optimal efficiency.
Instances such as the secret NSA program, working with AT&T, and Verizon, which recorded over 10 million telephone calls between American citizens, causes uncertainty among privacy advocates, and the greater powers it gives to telecommunication companies to monitor user activity.
While there have been efforts (such as US-EU Safe Harbor) to "harmonize" the legal environment, providers such as Amazon still cater to major markets (typically to the United States and the European Union) by deploying local infrastructure and allowing customers to select "regions and availability zones".
The Sydney Morning Herald reported about the Mosman bomb hoax, which was a life-threatening situation, that: [22] As to whether NSW Police needed a warrant to access the information it was likely to have, Byrne said it depended on the process taken.
A spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, Stephen Collins, said Google was likely to have handed over the need information on the basis of "probable cause or a warrant", which he said was "perfectly legitimate".
… Such things are rarely used in Australia for trivial or malevolent purposes.” Solutions to privacy in cloud computing include policy and legislation as well as end users' choices for how data is stored.
To comply with regulations including FISMA, HIPAA, and SOX in the United States, the Data Protection Directive in the EU and the credit card industry's PCI DSS, users may have to adopt community or hybrid deployment modes that are typically more expensive and may offer restricted benefits.
This is how Google is able to "manage and meet additional government policy requirements beyond FISMA"[24][25] and Rackspace Cloud or QubeSpace are able to claim PCI compliance.
[26] Many providers also obtain a SAS 70 Type II audit, but this has been criticised on the grounds that the hand-picked set of goals and standards determined by the auditor and the auditee are often not disclosed and can vary widely.
FedRAMP consists of a subset of NIST Special Publication 800-53 security controls specifically selected to provide protection in cloud environments.
The FedRAMP program has also established a Joint Accreditation Board (JAB) consisting of Chief Information Officers from DoD, DHS, and GSA.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized the United States government during the Megaupload seizure process for considering that people lose property rights by storing data on a cloud computing service.
[42] Intel General Manager of high-density computing, Jason Waxman, is quoted as saying that a homogeneous system of 15,000 servers would cost $6 million more in capital expenditure and use 1 megawatt of power.
[50] OpenStack supporters include AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Yahoo, Huawei and now VMware.
Issues barring the adoption of cloud computing are due in large part to the private and public sectors' unease surrounding the external management of security-based services.
To mitigate the threat, cloud computing stakeholders should invest heavily in risk assessment to ensure that the system encrypts to protect data, establishes trusted foundation to secure the platform and infrastructure, and builds higher assurance into auditing to strengthen compliance.
[73] In 2009, a banking trojan illegally used the popular Amazon service as a command and control channel that issued software updates and malicious instructions to PCs that were infected by the malware.
Due to the fact that the neighboring VMs may be activated or deactivated at arbitrary times, the result is an increased variation in the actual performance of cloud resources.
This effect seems to be dependent on the nature of the applications that run inside the VMs but also other factors such as scheduling parameters and the careful selection may lead to optimized assignment in order to minimize the phenomenon.
Žižek criticizes the argument purported by supporters of cloud computing that this phenomenon is part of the "natural evolution" of the Internet, sustaining that the quasi-monopolies "set prices at will but also filter the software they provide to give its "universality" a particular twist depending on commercial and ideological interests.
Exclusions typically include planned maintenance, downtime resulting from external factors such as network issues, human errors, like misconfigurations, natural disasters, force majeure events, or security breaches.
[8] Applications hosted in the cloud are susceptible to the fallacies of distributed computing, a series of misconceptions that can lead to significant issues in software development and deployment.