A Linkedin Poll, asking the question: “What’s your biggest concern with moving your applications to the cloud,” just closed, and populated the following results:
More than half of the survey respondents reported that security was the main concern they have with cloud computing, while reliability came up as a far second, and performance and cost trailing third and fourth, respectively. But when we consider these four factors: security, reliability, performance and cost, there are insights on the psychology of technology users that may be gleaned and used for the ecommerce community as well.
When most people refer to cloud computing, they imagine their data floating around in random patterns on the vast skies of the internet–where the server farm’s ether core lay, no one really knows. Not knowing exactly where your data is, like you can know where you laid your keys on the dinner table at home, causes a fair amount of angst. The what ifs start surfacing: what if their system goes down, what if for some reason I can’t access it, what if…what if…what if… It’s only natural to worry, especially when cloud computing is relatively new. Think about it though, there are still people who put cash in the bed mattress because they don’t know what the bank does with their money, so imagine the paranoia with letting some entity you’ve never met keep your digital assets (which in many cases is more valuable than a fixed amount of money).
On top of a foundation of fear, users now ask whether the cloud is reliable. Or back to the bank metaphor, can I do with my data what they say I can? And, regarding performance, we wonder whether the system is going to work as efficiently as it should. Cost is an issue, but if the three above factors work to user satisfaction, cost is less of a factor.
Ecommerce users, like Yahoo! Store merchants, technically enter “the cloud” the moment they sign up to use the Yahoo! platform, but the vaporous abstractness of it all becomes heavier on the mind when merchants begin considering mobile commerce, which in many cases exists exclusively in undisclosed third-party clouds. But so far, no one has complained of security breach, or other major issues, and it is likely more merchants will be moving further into the nameless cloud in the future. To what ends, we still don’t know, but it seems to be where the future of ecommerce is going.
How is cloud computing working for you? Any nightmare stories to report? Or, do you agree–cloud computing is where it’s at, and all the right steps are being made in regards to security, reliability, performance, and cost?
