Deploying a solution in the cloud is the default option for most organizations, whether startups or large enterprises developing new products or migrating legacy systems. There are numerous reasons and benefits driving this trend, yet many organizations remain not fully aware of them. In fact, many businesses not only struggle to fully utilize the advantages of the cloud but also face significant challenges during migration.
Common Challenges
Every technology comes with its own set of challenges, and cloud services are no exception. Here are some of the most common challenges that companies face are the following:
1. Misunderstanding cloud security responsibilities
When it comes to the cloud, a shared responsibility model for ensuring security is applied. Leading cloud service providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft take charge of securing the underlying cloud infrastructure and network. Meanwhile, it falls upon organizations utilizing these services to ensure the security of their applications, data, accounts, and any other information they manage and process. Those that don’t understand this may fail to plan and implement their security practices properly, leading to vulnerable applications and the risk of data breaches.
Learn more about how we integrate cloud-native security best practices on our Cloud Consulting page.
2. Lack of governance on costs and access
In most cases, cloud providers offer a PAYG (pay-as-you-go) cost model for their services, meaning users only pay for the actually-used or reserved resources. With this pricing model, organisations can optimize their expenditure, reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX), and focus on controlling operating costs (OPEX). Challenges appear when the company or product grows and suddenly there are several different services being deployed, managed by multiple users, with no clear overview or control. This can lead to decreased cost-efficiency and increased operational risks. The longer one waits to address the situation, the worse it tends to get.
3. Skill gaps in cloud-native practices
Setting up and managing resources in the cloud is different from managing virtual machines, networks, and firewalls in on-prem environments. And that’s not just because of the underlying technology, but also because of the shift in concepts and practices.
If you're missing key skills, our team can support you with custom development and integrations, detailed on our Services page.
Cloud is built to support agile methodologies, rapid deployments, and in-depth monitoring—almost out of the box. Achieving these benefits requires different skill sets. A larger skill gap results in reduced advantages from cloud utilization, particularly as your product and team expand.
On a positive note, despite the challenges, cloud has become the standard platform for deploying applications today. Adoption has never been higher, thanks to continuously evolving technology, widely available knowledge, and—most importantly—increasing awareness of how the cloud can improve efficiency when used correctly. Now let’s take a look at the principles that can help you get the most out of it.
Principles for Leveraging the Cloud
Different products and use cases require different strategies, but the following five principles apply to almost any organization utilizing the cloud:
1. Embrace managed services
The cloud gives you the opportunity to focus on delivering value to your customers through your product, rather than spending time managing infrastructure—like setting up networks or ensuring there’s enough storage capacity. In business, timing is crucial, and go-to-market time is constantly shrinking. Choosing managed services can help you keep up and ensure your infrastructure remains stable. For example, setting up a highly-available, replicated database can be much faster with a managed service and also reduce your operational overhead. As demand grows, you can balance between using managed and self-managed services to optimize both cost and performance.
2. Design software with cloud capabilities in mind
Not all software design patterns are equally well-suited to the cloud. While you can still run tightly-coupled monolithic applications in the cloud, scaling, replicating, or ensuring data consistency may become a challenge at some point. There’s no need to go full microservices from day one or rely entirely on cloud-native services, as that comes with its own set of challenges again. But you should at least keep in mind what the cloud offers and how you can incrementally adapt your solution to take advantage of it, without sacrificing delivery speed.
3. Take advantage of built-in security features
Cloud adoption is at an all-time high, and so are cyber threats. No application or service should go live without at least secure user authentication & authorization, protection against DDoS attacks, data encryption, and blocking unwanted traffic. The good news is that all major cloud vendors support these features and offer seamless integration with other services. You should always treat security measures like insurance: implement them early and build on that foundation to avoid bigger issues down the road.
To learn more about designing secure cloud applications and best practices, check out the details here.
4. Ensure high availability and elasticity
Global apps and services must deliver low-latency experiences to users, regardless of their location. Every millisecond counts and a slow or unavailable service can lead to churn and revenue loss. For optimal performance and reliability, it's essential to scale your workloads and data across multiple regions. While replication in the cloud does increase costs, it doesn’t always scale linearly—especially when combined with autoscaling. Cloud platforms allow you to scale resources in and out, or up and down, based on real-time demand, helping you balance performance with cost efficiency. Cloud simplifies the process of creating elastic and reliable systems, as long as it is planned and executed correctly.
5. Strive for operational excellence
Managing infrastructure, monitoring applications, or recovering from outages can be either really challenging or really simple. It depends on how strong your foundations are. Tools like infrastructure as code (IaC), centralized logging and monitoring, and automated deployment pipelines take some time to set up initially but offer huge returns in reliability and agility. This is not the area to cut corners—delaying operational best practices makes things harder in the long run. Reducing operational overhead should be one of your main goals when using the cloud. Always evaluate your choices from an operational perspective.
Let Povio help you unlock the potential of the cloud for your business
Choosing the cloud as the platform to build your product on can be the right decision, if you take the right actions and leverage its strengths. It’s not always the easiest or cheapest option, but there are clear benefits when used correctly. Whether you’re new to the cloud or have been using it for a while, having the right mindset and skillset to continuously improve your setup will help you get the most out of it.
If you’re not sure where to start, we at Povio have helped companies design and build cloud-native systems from scratch, and migrate existing workloads incrementally.
When your setup feels too complicated, expensive, or just not working well, it's typically better to take a step back and repair it.
Read about our cloud services and contact us here.
