How does the cloud fit in your outsourcing agenda?

"First to mind when asked what 'the cloud' is, a majority respond it's either an actual cloud, the sky, or something related to weather" - Citrix Cloud Survey Guide, August 2012.

Two years have passed since that quote - and cloud computing has become a major market. Many "tech giants", such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are "fighting" to become the primary provider in this "Cloud Age". Cloud computing represents centralized data storage, with the data accessible (online) from anywhere: even on business trips or holidays you can still manage your documents and workloads - and make your boss happy :)

Benefits and challenges for software development and outsourcing companies:

• For software development, one of the cloud's biggest advantages is the storage & price flexibility. Every “cloud provider” has a variety of storage options and benefits, that can scale up to unlimited storage. There is almost no limit to the storage space, as long as you can afford it. Also, customers are able to easily upgrade or downgrade their plan, to fit their software development requirements.
• The cloud, being an always-online technology, can be accessed at any given time, from any global location. You might think that the issue of internet outages would rather favor in-house solutions; but this is no longer a frequent occurrence nowadays.
• When you have all your files online – in the cloud – concurrent usage and development is encouraged. Many tools were developed to allow collaborative work - for example: Google Docs, Visual Studio Online and GitHub. This also brings advantages the software outsourcing providers, allowing for a more transparent development process: they are able to build and share documentation and source code easily with their customers.
• Compared to an in-house server, the cloud doesn’t require additional maintenance costs (there's just the service subscription). When you pay for this kind of service, the provider has to ensure a high uptime and has to upgrade the servers when needed. Lowering costs for infrastructure translates into a higher budget that is made available for the actual software development – and that’s a plus for both companies and the end users.

Along with the numerous advantages, the cloud also brings security issues and even bugs . Data security is a major concern for software development and outsourcing companies and end users. The recent major security issues - Hearthbleed, Shellshock, Poodle - showed that nothing is safe online and forced cloud providers to constantly improve their security. However, solutions such as 2-step authentication , are a good starting point in providing additional security layers.

In those (many) cases when data privacy & safety represents a major constraint, there's a "hybrid" solution that can ensure a very good level of data security: private clouds (more expensive to setup & use, when compared to a public cloud offer - but also with many additional benefits).

Conclusions

Overall, the cloud began a revolution in the software development and outsourcing markets. The trend is to slowly replace the in-house solutions with cloud services, which allow a more centralized, flexible and cost-efficient way of storing and accessing data. Many experts argue over the advantages, disadvantages and the future of cloud computing - but what’s your opinion about this technology?