In the last blog post I talked about the big benefits of the cloud. What should you, as an executive, be on the lookout for?

Sometimes one of your organization’s most important applications, such as your ERP, offers a cloud based solution. If you have your internal application customized to populate forms in your word processing programs, etc., you may lose the ability to perform customizations if you move to the cloud.

The same with sharing data between your local applications. Moving one of your most important applications to the cloud may eliminate the ability to share data with your other applications.

It may be expensive to convert your systems to run in the cloud.

Using a cloud service just adds one more entity to the finger pointing game of “the hardware guy blames the software guy, who blames the cloud provider, who blames the Internet Service Provider” etc.

In the past, it was easy to define the perimeter of your network as existing at your firewall. Everything outside your firewall is “out there” and everything inside your firewall is “in here.” Utilizing cloud services for your private data blurs the delineation.

In the next blog post I’ll focus on the dangers of the cloud.

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