Here are cloud computing risks that businesses face:

1. Business continuity is not assured.

2. Security and privacy of sensitive data are not assured.

3. Availability of applications and services is not assured.

4. There is no accountability for the service provider in meeting SLAs.

5. There is no solution for data sovereignty and data residency issues.

6. Switching between cloud service providers is not easy or timely.

Let us discuss each in detail below:

Cloud Computing Risks for Businesses

1. Business continuity is not assured

Companies and organizations are concerned about the risks of failure of cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. What happens when one of these giants suffers a catastrophic failure? 

If a company has business continuity plans in place, it can switch to another hosting service provider that is still functional. However, with cloud computing, there is no such option on the table. As a result, business continuity is rendered useless and companies are forced to go down with the ship.

2. Security and privacy of sensitive data are not assured

All data that enters the cloud is encrypted with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) 256 before being sent to the cloud servers. However, some security experts believe that this level of encryption might not be enough to protect sensitive data from hackers and cybercriminals. 

Also, what happens if a law enforcement agency requests access to your company’s data? For example, Google received thousands of these requests from government agencies in 2012 alone. Thus, your company might not have control over sensitive information once it is stored in the cloud. This can lead to legal issues for your business.

3. Availability of applications and services is not assured

Like any other network, the cloud network can suffer a breakdown or outage due to various reasons including technical glitches or natural disasters. During an outage, all companies using the cloud hosting service will lose access to their information. This can cause downtime in their business activities and result in loss of revenue for these companies as well as loss of confidence among customers who use their products or services. 

In addition, you will not be able to access your data during an outage without paying additional money for extra storage space on another server or going through complex procedures with your network administrator at your organization or datacenter provider for replicating files from one server to another server at the datacenter. 

This will waste your time and money both in the short term and long term if you have no backup copies of your files stored at a remote location outside of the data center facility including offsite via tape backup strategy or in remote hosting locations like Cloud Hosting Data Centers.

4. There is no accountability for the service provider in meeting SLAs

Another risk that you face when adopting cloud computing is a lack of accountability for meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between you and your cloud service provider. Since cloud computing is a new technology, there is no standard for monitoring the performance metrics of a cloud hosting service provider. 

Thus, there is no way to tell if you are getting the best SLA performance from your hosting company.