Advantages
- Reduction in upfront capital expenditure on hardware and software deployment Consumption is usually billed on a utility or subscription model.
- Users can terminate the contract at any time and are often covered by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties. This reduces risk and uncertainty and ensures return on investment.
- Location independence, so long as there is access to the Internet.
- Increased security at a much lesser cost as compared to traditional standalone applications due to centralization of data and increased security-focused resources.
- Easy to maintain as they do not have to be installed on each users computers.
- The cloud computing model should be coined as Green model as it maximizes usage of resources and minimizes wastage making it environment friendly.
Disadvantages
1.Security and Privacy:
Users might not be comfortable handing over their data to a third party. This is an even greater concern when it comes to companies that wish to keep their sensitive information on cloud servers.
It is ensuring that a client's data is not accessed by any unauthorized users is of great importance for any cloud service.To make their servers more secure, cloud service vendors have to developed password protected accounts, security servers through which all data being transferred must pass and data encryption techniques. In cloud model, Service providers are responsible for maintaining data security and enterprises would have to rely on them.
Cloud computing makes our small business dependent on the reliability of your Internet connection. When it is offline, we are offline. And even the most reliable cloud computing service providers suffer server outages sometimes.
3.Cost
While in the long run, cloud hosting is a more cheaper than traditional technologies, the fact that it is currently new and has to be researched and improved actually makes it more expensive.Data centers has to buy or develop the software that will run the clouds, rewire the machines and fix unforeseen problems. This makes their initial cloud offers more expensive.
4.Knowledge And Integration