REGULATIONS

Depending on your industry sector, vertical market, or geographical location, you may have to abide by an array of government regulations determining how you use and store sensitive data. The healthcare and financial services industries are common examples of verticals in which IT has to take extra steps to prove to the government that sensitive data is secure. And, in some cases, that means keeping sensitive data stored in private data centers.

SECURITY

Certain companies are dealing with data that requires more advanced security than what cloud providers can offer. Or perhaps, the executives in the IT department simply feel more comfortable shouldering the risk themselves. In either case, security can be a legitimate determining factor in choosing to store data and apps on premises.

LATENCY

Latency within private data centers and across private WAN connections is easily controllable. On the other hand, when you are leveraging the Internet to access cloud resources, latency can become a major problem. If access to your data requires low and predictable latency times – as is the case with many audio and video data repositories -- it's usually much easier to manage and distribute this type of data when you control the network end-to-end.

VISIBILITY

Do you really know where your data is? That's one question that continues to haunt early adopters of public clouds. The fact is, once sensitive data is moved or generated on a public cloud, it becomes very difficult to see exactly where the data resides. Eventually, technology will overcome these cloud visibility hurdles. Until then, this is a very real concern for many of the IT professionals I speak with on a regular basis.

LACK OF TRUST

Trust in a cloud provider is difficult to quantify. It depends on the specific needs of your enterprise, the cloud provider's overall reputation, and the kinds of service-level agreements you have in place. Your organization's level of trust with a specific cloud provider might transition multiple times throughout your relationship, depending on these and other factors.

When you're considering the idea of housing sensitive data inside a public cloud, you should assume that, at some point, you will lose faith that your provider is keeping your data secure to the degree you have deemed appropriate. Trust issues are often the most difficult to overcome for IT executives when considering whether or not to move data and apps into the cloud.

ACCESSIBILITY

In a perfect world, all users in all locations around the globe will have high bandwidth and unfettered access into any of the various public cloud providers with which you choose to partner. We're not quite there yet. The issue is especially problematic when you are operating a global company with remote sites in multiple countries. Access to cloud resources can become a problem due to bandwidth constraints at the last mile. Another factor to consider is situations in which certain countries restrict access to all sorts of Internet content. In such cases, accessibility using private WAN connections to private data centers can be more reliable and consistent compared to using public cloud offerings and relying on the Internet as your primary access method.