Cloud Computing at Airports

1. Introduction

The cloud presents several advantages and disadvantages to the airport, the answer of whether or not to migrate to the cloud must be based on a case by case evaluation to determine if it fits the needs and strategy of the corporation. The advantages of migrating to the cloud for a corporation include the faster development of business initiatives, the transfer of heavy initial capital expenditures to much lower and sustainable levels of operating expenditures, provides a high level of IT flexibility that is infinitely scalable and enables easy collaboration with other and new business units. The disadvantages of migrating to the cloud for a corporation are that a corporation must find suitable and dependable business partners that can be held accountable to safeguard information placed on the cloud, as well as maintain a near 100% up-time. Essentially, a corporation that utilizes the cloud is wholly dependable on the cloud provider for security and continued operations and is no longer capable of sustaining their own in-house IT operations.

Utilizing the cloud enables a corporation to much more quickly implement new business initiatives because there is no need to raise and authorize the initial capital required to purchase the necessary infrastructure, platforms and/or software to implement those initiatives. Relatively speaking, a much cheaper operating expenditure can be incurred via a service purchased directly from a cloud provider and the new initiative can be instituted quickly, giving the corporation added speed. Additionally, a corporation can gain significant IT flexibility through working with cloud providers. As stated previously, instead of significant initial investments and installation times, a corporation can simply communicate with a cloud providers and institute added capacity or additional programs in the cloud. Cloud solutions are also infinitely scalable should a corporation need to expand any of the processes or concepts quickly, eliminating the need for unexpected and costly capital investments should business grow faster than expected. Lastly, a corporation that utilizes the cloud can easily cooperate and collaborate with business partners that require shared data, by integrating them into their particular cloud service.

Conversely, utilizing the cloud has several disadvantages for any corporation that must be considered. The initial migration of data from in-house to the cloud can be costly, and time consuming with the potential for periods of down-time that can create additional unexpected costs. Even if these costs are mitigated, there are still several disadvantages to consider regarding migration to the cloud. By utilizing cloud services, a corporation is placing the control for the security of their data entirely in the hands of the cloud service provider, which may have serious repercussions if the security standards of the cloud