Cloud storage has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to store, access, and share data online through cloud computing services. While cloud storage offers many benefits like convenience, flexibility, and collaboration, there are some downsides to consider before moving data to the cloud.
Security and Privacy Risks
One of the biggest potential disadvantages of cloud storage is the greater security and privacy risks that come with storing data remotely on the provider’s servers rather than locally on your own hardware. When using cloud storage services, you are essentially handing over control and management of your data to a third-party provider.
Some of the security and privacy risks of cloud storage include:
- Account or service hijacking – If a hacker gains access to your cloud account, they could steal, modify, or delete your data.
- Data breaches – breaches of cloud provider security could expose your data.
- Unauthorized access by cloud provider employees
- Outages preventing access to your data
- Possibility of government surveillance/requests for your data from the cloud provider
To help mitigate security risks, cloud storage providers offer encryption for data at rest and in transit. However, the encryption keys are often controlled by the provider rather than the user. Some other best practices for securing cloud data include enabling multi-factor authentication, restricting file permissions and access controls, and enabling remote wipe capabilities in case a device is lost or stolen.
Loss of Physical Control Over Your Data
With local storage, you retain full physical control over the hardware your data is stored on. With cloud storage, you cede that physical control to the service provider. While reputable cloud storage providers take extensive measures to protect data, having direct control over the physical security of your data storage may give some users greater peace of mind. Storage hardware controlled by the user also makes it simpler to ensure compliance with any regulatory requirements regarding data security and retention.
Dependency on Internet Connectivity
To access and synchronize data in the cloud you must have an active internet connection. If you lose connectivity because of a power outage, wireless issues, or other causes, you may lose the ability to view, update, backup, or share files until the connection is restored. While some cloud services offer offline access capabilities, bandwidth limitations usually restrict the amount of cloud data you can effectively use without an internet connection.
Potential Long-Term Costs
Many cloud storage providers offer limited free plans, but fees can add up over time for premium accounts with more storage space and features. Bandwidth usage, additional user licenses, advanced security, compliance controls, and integrations all affect long-term costs. Some providers charge extra fees for transferring large amounts of data out of their cloud.
If these costs rise substantially or you decide to switch providers, you could face high data transfer fees when moving large volumes of cloud data. This risk of vendor lock-in can make it expensive to change cloud storage providers once significant data is already stored in the cloud.
Limited Storage Capacity
Consumer cloud storage services offer limited free storage space (usually 5GB-15GB), with additional storage capacity available for a fee. Even paid plans may have storage limitations depending on your needs and budget. Enterprise-grade cloud storage can provide virtually unlimited capacity, but costs are higher.
Compliance Risks
For highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, cloud storage may present compliance challenges regarding data security, privacy, and jurisdictional restrictions on where certain types of sensitive data can be stored. Maintaining regulatory compliance is the responsibility of the customer, not the cloud provider.
Some questions to consider regarding compliance when evaluating cloud storage include:
- What physically geographical regions will my data be stored in?
- What assurances does the provider offer regarding data security?
- Can the provider guarantee compliance with regulations applicable to my industry and data types?
- How often is sensitive data encrypted and decrypted?
- Are encryption keys managed by provider or customer?
Make sure any cloud provider you consider can provide adequate guarantees and documentation regarding their compliance with regulations that apply to your data.
Performance Issues
Latency, bandwidth constraints, network outages, and other connectivity issues can sometimes impair performance when accessing or updating cloud-based data. Servers in remote locations could result in higher latency. Heavy traffic loads may degrade responsiveness. Critical applications requiring fast performance may not always work as well when cloud storage replaces local storage.
Difficult To Recover Accidentally Deleted Files
Once data in the cloud is accidentally lost, corrupted or deleted, it can be difficult to recover. While most providers have data recovery services, response times to recover data could be too slow to avoid disruptions to operations if critical files were impacted. Backing up cloud data to another location does not necessarily guarantee recovery can occur quickly enough to avoid adverse impacts from data loss.
Migration Difficulties
Getting large volumes of existing data into the cloud can take substantial time and effort. Initial data uploads can hog bandwidth and slow down your network. The time and complexity to fully migrate existing on-premises data stores to the cloud can be greater than anticipated. Many cloud storage providers charge extra fees based on how much data you need to migrate.
Extracting large amounts of data out of a cloud provider to switch to a different provider or back to on-premises storage presents similar challenges. The costs, time, and effort required for a major cloud migration should not be underestimated when considering a move to cloud storage.
Risk of Provider Shutdown
Reputable enterprise cloud providers are generally highly reliable, but there is always some small risk of a provider going out of business and shutting down completely. This could result in temporary data loss while backups are restored with another provider. To protect against this risk, always maintain backups of critical cloud-based data either locally or with another cloud provider.
Difficulties Integrating With Existing Systems
Integrating cloud storage with in-house data systems like content management, analytics, CRM, ERP, and custom software platforms can sometimes require additional effort and expense. There is often substantial work involved with modifying legacy on-premises applications and processes to integrate smoothly with cloud storage. Ongoing management of integrations between cloud storage and internal software systems can also add overhead for your IT team.
Unanticipated Cloud Costs
Some first-time business cloud users get unexpectedly high bills from inadequate monitoring and optimization of cloud resources. Unchecked storage volume, bandwidth usage, and associated services can result in costly overages. Careful management and allocation of cloud storage resources is essential, especially with larger deployments across multiple regions and clouds.
Security Configuration Errors
Incorrect security configurations of cloud storage like unrestricted public sharing settings, poor access controls, and unencrypted data at rest can lead to preventable exposure of sensitive data. Keeping cloud permissions, encryption, user access, and sharing settings properly configured requires ongoing governance to avoid costly mistakes.
Increased Attack Surface for Malware and Ransomware
Cloud storage interfaces like web and mobile apps provide additional surfaces that attackers can target with malware and ransomware attempts. Workers accessing cloud data through compromised endpoints could expose data or encrypted files to ransomware attacks.
Data Transfer Bottlenecks
Getting large volumes of data into or out of most cloud storage services is only possible over internet connections. Cloud vendors typically charge for outbound bandwidth usage after certain limits. For petabyte-scale datasets, transferring data to/from cloud storage across lower-bandwidth connections is inefficient and costly compared to on-premises servers on the local network.
Vendor Lock-in
Proprietary APIs, non-portable file formats, incompatible object storage models, and lack of implementations across different cloud storage services make migrating cloud data between vendors difficult. Carefully evaluate portability concerns when choosing a provider to avoid excessive risks of supply chain dependency and lock-in.
Lack of Physical Access for Data Forensics
Investigating cyber incidents through data forensics on cloud storage is only feasible through vendor support services. Unlike physical servers in the victim’s possession, cloud users cannot directly access storage hardware to conduct their own forensic data gathering and analysis.
Shared Responsibility Model Complexity
Cloud’s shared responsibility model splits security and compliance duties between provider and customer, but determining these boundaries is difficult. Unclear shared responsibility for patching systems, auditing configurations, encryption, access controls, and incident response can leave dangerous gaps in protection.
Uncertainty About Cross-Border Data Regulations
Data sovereignty laws that place restrictions on where certain data types can be stored are still evolving. The complex global legal environment surrounding regulated data makes assessing cross-border data compliance obligations difficult for multi-national organizations.
Risks from Third-Party Access
Cloud storage providers extensively utilize third-party managed services and outsourced infrastructure, potentially exposing cloud data to more entities. Greater dependence on third-parties may lead to unauthorized data exposures or use.
Increased Insider Threat Vulnerability
More cloud provider employees have logical access to cloud storage compared to on-premises servers, increasing risks of data theft or exposure by insiders. Privileged third-party access to cloud infrastructure similarly increases insider risks to cloud data security and privacy.
Weaker Visibility into Data Risks
The lack of physical control over cloud infrastructure can limit internal visibility into data protection status and vulnerabilities. Cloud users may struggle to gain full insights into security controls, compliance gaps, misconfigurations, orphaned resources, and asset inventories.
Unclear Disaster Recovery Readiness
Limited documentation from vendors on contingency plans, availability across regions, and readiness testing programs reduce confidence in disaster recovery protections for cloud data. It can be challenging for customers to fully assess preparedness risks for incidents like large-scale outages.
Isolated Backup and Recovery Systems
Data silos, inconsistent classification schemes, and separate management of cloud data from on-premises apps and repositories complicate backup and recovery processes. Poor integration and coordination of data protection systems across cloud and legacy platforms increase recoverability risks.
Conclusion
Cloud storage can provide substantial benefits like lower storage costs, greater accessibility, built-in redundancy, and potential disaster recovery protections. However, relying on the cloud also comes with unique risks to evaluate and mitigate. Proper governance and security controls are essential to realize the upside of cloud storage while minimizing the downsides.
Organizations should carefully assess options from reputable providers that suit their specific data privacy, security, residency, and compliance needs before migrating to cloud storage. Despite its drawbacks, cloud-based data storage will likely continue growing as organizations become more data-driven and distributed work becomes more common.