Discuss in 500 words, why institutions might be reluctant to move there it to the cloud. consider specific industries like education, medicine, military, etc.

1. Performance and uptime:In mission critical IT systems like those in the military performance and uptime are so important that the institutions might be reluctant to surrender their local infrastructure for cloud based systems, even if the cloud systems advertise better performance than what the institution's deployment can boast of. Even many corporates are still worried about this aspect of cloud computing. It’s no secret that a fraction of a second on load time can lead to loss of customers.

2. Security:Along with loss of control, security is arguably the biggest concern many large organizations like the military, academic institutions and hospitals have. Can other customers access our data? Have all the security patches been kept up to date? These question create a reluctance to migrate to the cloud among executives and IT directors in these institutions.

3. Data Protection:Closely tied in with security, institutions are concerned about data protection. Many governments place strict data protection requirements on large companies and standards audit schemes such as ISO-9001 place additional restrictions on firms.

For example, the UK’s Data Protection Act requires that personal data not to be transferred to any country outside the EU, unless that country “ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.” Practically, that means it’s often easier for servers to be physically located in the EU for many European institutions.

4. Losing control:When systems go down, it’s invariably the IT Director who takes the blame, so it’s no surprise that they are nervous about handing over responsibility for infrastructure to somebody they don’t even know.

Traditionally, if a hard drive fails or a CPU overheats, it’s the IT department who get the 3am call to fix it. It’s up to them to order the replacement hardware, power down the machine and get it back into production as soon as possible.

Even if you’re renting space in a hosting centre and paying for support, chances are you are physically allowed into the building and have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, if all else fails, you can go in and fix the hardware yourself.

By moving to cloud computing, the IT Director or CIO can feel like they’re handing over control to a 3rd-party. What happens if one of the drives goes or there’s a networking issue? Who decides what hardware to buy?

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