Likes & Dislikes of Customer about Cloud

Things customers like about cloud based apps

You don’t have to worry about IT infrastructure. The cost and maintenance of the hardware and software is the responsibility of the vendor. The TCO from the customer is absolutely minimal. Customers don’t have to invest heavily in the IT department and maintenance of the systems

You only pay as per the user subscription. This is a very comfortable option for the customer as customers can pay as per the usage of the application and reduce the cost. This model can be more effective to customer as you just have to buy more users according to the need.

Performance and security managed by vendor. If the vendor is a trusted one, the security can be trusted, by doing almost nothing or some very minimal steps (IP address segment matching) at the customer’s end.

Get upgrades constantly with new features. Delivery of these new features is much faster compared to traditional on premise world. Customers can get the latest version of the software at any point of time without incurring too much of upgrade plan, downtime cycles and all. The entire lifecycle management is taken care by the vendor. Unknown or not reported bugs are resolved as the corrections are constantly delivered

You just need a browser to login and run your business. This is a killer feature for many customer. For doing 95% of the tasks a web browser is sufficient. So the devices to run the browser, it could be a PC or a tablet or a mobile is sufficient. It can be done on the go. With internet coming up everywhere and becoming a utility, the work can be done anywhere, anytime.

24/7 support available for your business to run. Most of the popular cloud based apps provide an excellent customer support round the clock. Many cloud apps provide an inline chat facility to get in touch with the support for handling minor issues.

You can utilize your part of your IT staff in other projects. They can work on making the systems developed internally better, try to integrate with the  cloud based apps or make them available in cloud.

Things customer don’t like about cloud based apps

Customer has no option but to upgrade to the latest version of the software. Sometimes the customer has to be upgraded forcefully because the underlying system or tenant at the vendor is getting major upgrade. So sometimes the customer must get used to the constant changes in the software.

Difficulty in integrating their existing on premise software. There might be an robust on premise application which is an integral part of the customer’s
operation but effort has to be spent to integrate it with the cloud. Since cloud-on-premise integration is just evolving, things might be little instable during the initial phase.

Privacy. The privacy is a double edged sword. If the vendor is new in the market, they cannot be trusted or it takes a lot time to trust. With the recent “Edward Snowden whistle blowing NSA snooping” controversy, it really is an embarrassing scenario for the customer, as the customer’s business content is lying somewhere, in some data center. This is being alleviated by bring the private cloud model. But the government as well as the cloud vendor need to be trusted and transparent to ensure there is no violation of privacy policies of the customer.