Cloud Computing Implementation: Key Issues and Solutions

To meet ever-changing business needs, organizations are required to invest time and budget to scale up IT infrastructure such as hardware, software and services. However with own premises and investment in IT infrastructure scaling process can be slow and costly. Moreover, even if organizations scale up their IT infrastructure, these are hardly able to achieve the optimal utilization of the same. This has been a major hurdle in organizations decision to invest huge capital and resources for scaling up its operations. All this has forced companies to continuously look for innovative solutions in the form of new technological solutions that are easy as well as cost effective. One such technology that has come as a boon today is cloud computing. "Cloud computing" is a paradigm shift to provide computing over the internet. It implements Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) resulting in less investment on IT infrastructure, rapid elasticity and finally reduced total cost of ownership. However, implementing Cloud Computing is not so easy and there are lot of issues that may need to be taken care of before it can deliver intended benefits. Unfortunately, there is not enough of research available which has researched various implementations issues in a structured way. In this paper, we have made an attempt to understand the concept of cloud computing in detail and tried to structure major issues that may arise while implementing cloud computing after reviewing the literature thoroughly. Further, apart from identifications of these key issues, possible solutions as suggested by the practitioners have been also been discussed.