There's a lot of good in cloud adoption, which is why I've railed against problems that threaten to kill cloud computing. This summer, three more problems have surfaced that are raising my blood pressure -- and threatening the cloud.
1. The recent AWS outages. Amazon.com is the leader in the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) space, so it has a responsibility to set the standards for service. Lately, it has had too many outages, opening up cloud computing to criticism around the risks of using public cloud resources. The federal government is now looking into the outages, and the naysayers are coming out of the woodwork to toss mud at AWS -- and at cloud computing in general.
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2. Vendor technology duels. As with any overheated technology space, the larger technology providers are sniping at each other's versions of the cloud. Each says its version is perfect, whereas their competitors' versions of cloud computing are proprietary and, of course, evil.
Organizations debating the use of cloud computing will continue to watch these vendor marketing battles, waiting to see who wins. But there won't be any winners any time soon, so hesitant enterprises will miss the benefit of cloud computing. It's a shame that cloud computing's benefit is obscured by the FUD that so many of the providers spin in their competitive insults -- it hurts everyone.
3. New European regulations around the use of cloud services. European privacy watchdogs are recommending the use of a new auditing system for vetting cloud providers in the United States and elsewhere. You can find this in Article 29 Working Party, which is a group representing the various E.U. member states' data protection bodies.
There's a ton of confusion around what it means to be compliant, so it's easy to surmise that many organizations are not compliant. However, there's little enforcement. That will change with the proposed auditing system -- and it will make the adoption of cloud computing in Europe a very painful experience.
I'm sure more such evils will surface later this year for me to call out!
This article, "3 more evils that threaten cloud computing," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog and track the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.