This is Part 6 of cloud computing tutorial. Moving to the cloud is a great step forward.
In our previous video, we discussed benefits of cloud computing. In this video we'll discuss
risks of cloud computing. Loss of cloud data and services is one of the main risks. Data in
the cloud and services are typically accessed over the internet. So, this obviously means the
speed at which you can access cloud services and data are limited by the speed of your internet
connection. If your connection to the internet is lost, your access to cloud data and services
is also lost. The servers or network at the cloud service provider end, can also go down for a
number of reasons. Again, when this happens, you lose access to cloud data and services. However
the good news is, cloud service providers have SLA's, that is service level agreements. Most
of the cloud providers guarantee 99.9% of up-time. If they fail to meet this service level agreement,
you will be compensated. Data security. When you store your business, employees
and customer data in the cloud, you're placing your complete trust on the cloud service provider
to secure and safeguard your data. Cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web
Services invest lots of resources and money to implement and improve cloud security, but still
by placing your data in the cloud as opposed to in-house you're opening up security risks.
Also everyone including hackers know if they can manage to hack into cloud service providers,
they will have access to huge amounts of data. So as we speak, there are hundreds of thousands
of cyber attacks going on around the world. Take a look at this bitdefender webpage, you can see the
real-time cyber threat map. Every second, in fact every few milliseconds there is an attempted cyber
attack. You can see the time, attack type, attack country and the target country. So the point that
i'm trying to make is, by placing your data in the cloud you're relying on the cloud service provider
to protect your data and the fact is your data is only as secure as your cloud service provider.
However, best practices like encryption, two-factor authentication, auditing, reviewing
and rotating access keys and credentials can reduce the security risk to some extent.
Compliance is another important risk that must be considered when moving to cloud. If it's
your own personal data, like emails or photos for example you don't have to worry about complaints
and legal risks. However, if it's an organization and if it deals with
financial data, healthcare data, credit card data or any regulated data for that matter,
by law, the organization is responsible for protecting that data. It also needs to know
where the data is stored, who is allowed to access it and the measures that are put in place
to protect it. There are many local and international regulations like GDPR, Hipaa etc.
By moving to the cloud, you are relying on the cloud service provider to protect data and adhere
to these local and international regulations. Your company may still be liable if the cloud service
provider fails to live up to the task and if there is a data breach. Cloud in general reduces
upfront infrastructure cost and its pay-as-you-go model provides more flexibility. Depending on
the traffic, the amount of cloud resources you consume, the plan you have chosen, the way you
scale resources up and down determines the overall price you pay. Sometimes, this overall price tag
may be higher than what you have anticipated. Most cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform provide cost calculators and it's a good idea to use
these calculators to get an estimate of what you will be paying. You may also experiment different
options and plans until you find what works best for you. There are several things that you can do
to reduce your cloud costs. For example, try not to over provision cloud resources. If you think
performance will be an issue you can always auto scale up resources based on certain pre-configured
threshold limits and don't forget to auto scale down as well. Otherwise you will end up paying
for resources that are not being used. Along the same lines, automate the process to start
or stop your server instances. This ensures, you're not paying when you're not using them.
You can also create alerts, that notify cloud spending. It's always good to keep these risks
in mind before moving to the cloud. The good news is, there are different types of clouds,
best practices and proven techniques that can mitigate some of these risks. We'll see
all of these in action, in our upcoming videos. That's it in this video. Thank you for listening.