Whitney Vickrey, chief service officer at GCE, has outlined several common beliefs customers have on migrating to a cloud-based environment and how providers are working to address each opinion, which she calls misconceptions.

Vickrey told ClickSoftware in a blog post published Sept. 17 that customers’ chief concerns have always centered on the areas of data security and control, system reliability, compatibility with other systems and cost.

She noted the energy and resources that cloud vendors spend to address such issues and to treat security provision as a top priority and chief selling point.

“Cloud vendors stake their entire reputation on their ability to provide secure service, and a significant amount of financial information is already stored safely in the cloud, including payroll and banking,” Vickrey said.

Vickrey also sought to address the belief that cloud-based applications are unreliable, telling the website cloud apps have a 99.9 percent uptime and that vendors follow compliance controls and protocols designed to ensure data security, integrity and availability whenever it is needed.

Makers of cloud-based, software-as-a-service platforms are also actively partnering with customer relationship management tools and other e-commerce applications with a goal to integrate their offerings with the company’s other systems.

“Decision makers don’t want an outlier system that runs independently from the rest of their operations,” Vickrey explained.