Adoption of cloud in Calibration ventures is still in the early stages. In this blog, I examine the apprehensions of Calibration Labs about moving to the Cloud and how best we can address them.
The calibration industry has one of the lowest adoption rates of Cloud technology. Reasons vary from apprehension about the security of the data to cost. These are problems that Cloud infrastructure vendors and application vendors have successfully addressed.
Data Security
The first and foremost concern of calibration labs is the security of their data. Indeed a very valid concern.
In any distributed application there should be three layers of security. Application layer security should take care of authentication and authorization that allows access to the application only to designated actors, encryption before persisting the data, and code injection by hackers. SSL and IPSec take care of security at the transport layer and network layer.
Confused? Ignore the above paragraph. Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and others have ensured best practices are followed to secure the applications hosted with them. Ensuring security is now more of a responsibility of the application provider. So choosing a proven application provider is the way to go.
Ensuring the same level of security that cloud providers offer in your on-premise installation is even more challenging. And when a situation arises, you are all alone to handle it.
Data Ownership
Who owns all your data that is stored on the cloud?
The short and long answer is ‘You’.
Neither the infrastructure provider nor the application provider has any claim of ownership of your data. Make sure you get this assurance from your application vendor as part of the service agreement. The same can then be legally enforced if an unlikely dispute arises.
Where is the data stored?
It’s legally mandated by many countries that any personally identifiable information related to their citizens is stored within their jurisdiction. You should ensure your application provider agrees to store the data as per the legal requirements. Why wouldn’t they?
How much will it cost
Usually, the applications are multi-tenanted, which means your data is logically separated from that of others. This brings down your cost considerably as the cost of operations of the application provider will be shared by all their clients. You do not need to worry about software updation and other IT-related activities. With an on-premise application, you will end up owning the infrastructure, its updation, and the IT team adding to the cost of your operations. With the cloud, you save on all these.
In my opinion, there is not even a single valid reason for you to shy away from cloud deployment. The cloud offers considerable advantages in whichever parameters you choose to prioritize.
Why wait then?
If you would like to know more about cloud migration possibilities of your calibration business, feel free to ping us at consulting@metquay.com. We are here to help you.
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