Businesses that want to take advantage of Cloud Computing can learn from some of the common mistakes made by others, says Nancy Gohring in her Network World article.

Pitfall #1 – Failing to set up redundancies for disaster scenarios
Don’t assume that a cloud server is backed up somewhere else. You still need to make sure you’re backing up and will need a redundancy plan in place. Researchers at Forrester call this “the uneven handshake” between what the services cloud providers offer and the responsibilities left to the customer. Cloud services typically do not take care of security, application availability, backup and recovery, and service performance.

Pitfall #2 – Not accommodating for data center failures
Companies should ensure that their systems are load balanced and that workloads shift to different zones in the event of an outage.

Pitfall #3 – Failing to accommodate for potential bandwidth issues
App performance is coming to the forefront. Companies are beginning to look harder at the ability of the cloud to support business critical elements and achieve desired latency. A couple of years ago, companies were implementing centralized cloud deployments, trying to pack as many servers and storage devices as possible into a small set of data centers. Now, with increasing focus on app performance, companies are starting to shift to distributed platforms where they can run applications on infrastructure closer to end users in order to improve performance. Poor app performance is driving some businesses to switch from public clouds to private clouds.