Characteristics of Cloud Computing

IT NETWORK DESIGNING

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Introduction

Bottler Company deals with the business of integrated metering solution for utilities such as electricity, gas, water, heating, and cooling. In addition to this, the company provides energy management services for utility companies. This line of services has positioned the company into a global player in this lucrative field. This demand for services provided by the company has led to the expansion of the company into a global entity with its operational offices located all over the globe to provide quality services to their customers in a range of services that includes but not limited to operational, regulatory and consumer-related issues. To achieve this goal, the company has divided its operational offices into namely North America, South America, Asia, and Asia-pacific. Globally, the company boast of 4500 employees distributed across the globe in over 30 countries. Apart from employees, the company, globally boast of over 2500 business relationships with their clients. This global nature of the business makes it ideal for the company to have a robust IT networking infrastructure to provide efficient services to clients. Within the Asia-pacific region, the company has several ranges of data centers with its main locations in Australia and New Zeeland. The company has two option of service rendering, either in In house or using regional service providers to ensure client satisfaction

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Despite this enormous investment, the current IT network infrastructure landscape doesn’t provide a robust means to manage the company IT needs in a more efficient and effective means. The problems faced by current landscape includes; less flexibility as the computing of the company is current tied to a location making it difficult for the employees and customers to interact with the business anywhere anytime. There is again the issues of greater administrative burden which includes doing administrative works that don’t really contribute to core business goals. Third, the current landscape reduces collaboration as the IT infrastructure has no central appeal since each region maintains its own pool of resources. The lack of central control of the IT network landscape makes it difficult to have more robust disaster recovery, especially if one or more regional data center suffers an information security attacks (Zeqiri, Aliu, Kostanica, & Prenaj, 2017). This challenges can be resolved by going to the cloud and virtualization of some hardware to reduce cost and make the administration of the company more efficient. Cloud computing integration shall also ensure there is scalability into the network to meet future market trends

Body

Task 1

Characteristics of Cloud computing

According to the NIST(National institute of standards and technology), cloud computing has the following five characteristics that are essential for bottlers company. They include

On-demand self-service

 cloud computing architecture, network-aware services such as email, apps, network, and various server services can be seamlessly provided without the need to individually interact with each of the service providers (Yu, Cao, & Schniederjans, 2017).

On-demand nature of cloud computing is beneficial to bottlers company to only make payments for what they actually need. This is possible because this characteristic enables the company to define their specific needs and only subscribes to the service that caters to their defined needs. Moreover, this feature enables the company to be scalable in the future without having to worry about the initial costs of buying equipment. Last but not least, this feature gives a lot of convenience to the business since the business can tailor its robust IT network infrastructure to meet their particular business needs (Pise, 2019).

Broad network access

The cloud computing architecture makes the network have broader access using standards. This makes cloud computing environments to be accessible by remote and mobile users using mobile phones and laptops anywhere anytime.

This feature is of great importance to the company as it enables it to aggregate multiple regional offices thereby reducing the cost of running and maintaining regional data centers.

Resource pooling

Cloud computing network architecture ensures there is a great degree of resource pooling whereby critical computing resources are pooled together to be aimed at serving multiple clients and customers. This pooled resources can be combinations of physical and virtual resources which can be configured to be assigned dynamically and reassigned dynamically based on the customer needs. The provides some sense of location independence for the customer as they will have no control over which location the resource is pooled from. Resources such as storage, memory, processing and bandwidth can be pooled (Kathuria, Mann, Khuntia, Saldanha, & Kauffman, 2018).

Bottler company can greatly benefit from this nature of cloud computing as it reduces duplication of services across regional and national centers thereby reducing the cost of operating those regional offices

Measure services

This characteristic of cloud computing environments brings a more automated control of the IT network infrastructure resources and enhance optimized use by leveraging the capabilities of the cloud computing environments to have some metering capabilities with a degree of abstraction. This characteristic shall be of importance to bottlers company as the network infrastructure resources can be efficiently monitored, controlled and reported thereby enhancing transparency between the service provider and the customer of the utility company.

Task 2

Cloud computing delivery models

The delivery model can be defined as the type of model upon which the cloud computing environment is based. The delivery models are broadly categorized into the following categories

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service(PaaS)
• Software as s Service(SaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS)

This delivery model is perhaps the most basic level of service delivery on the cloud computing environment. IaaS can be defined as the delivery of computing technology and infrastructure on-demand as the services scales. IaaS model provides the mechanism to access the basic computing resources such as virtual machines, physical machines, virtual storage. In addition, the IaaS provides services such as

• Virtual Local Area Networks(VLANs
• Load balancing
• Software bundles
• IP addresses
• Virtual machine disk storage

In this model, all the mentioned resources are made available to the end-user via the technology of server virtualization hence making the resources to be accessible by the cloud customer as though they own the resources (Goscinski, Broberg, & Buyya, 2011).

This service delivery model is will benefit the company in the following ways

• The company shall be given the full control over the administration of the virtual machines
• This model makes it more efficient and flexible to rent computing hardware
• Offers portability and interoperability with existing legacy applications

The potential issues with this model include the following

• Compatibility issues with the existing legacy systems security vulnerabilities
• Data erasing practices
• The sprawling of virtual machines

Platform as a Service(PaaS)

This cloud computing service delivery model focus on providing the runtime environment for application during development and deployment. In addition, it provides a range of deployment tool to use in application deployment

The PaaS provides the clients with the facilities needed to support the software life cycle for developing and deploying web-based application and services on the Internet.

The key benefits this model can bring to bottler company include;

• Relatively lower overhead costs due to administration
• The relatively lower total cost of ownership
• Provides the latest stable version of the software in the environment
• Provides more flexibility and scalability

Potential issues with this model include the following

• There is a lack of portability among different PaaS clouds
• Difficult to engineer security of the PaaS apps
• Scheduling of processing is based on events

Software as Service (SaaS)

This cloud computing model allows the usage of a particular software application as a service to the users. This represents software that is deployed on some hosted services and then users access it via the Internet. The following application can be deployed and accessed as a service over the web

• Billing and invoice system
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Human resource(HR) solutions
• Help Desk Applications

This model can be of great benefit to the bottler’s company in the following ways

• Provides more efficient usage of software licenses
• Gives more control due to central management and data
• Provides modest software tools
• Have the multitenant capability

Despite its benefits, the SaaS model has the following issues

• Browser risks
• Depends on availability of network
• Lack of portability among different SaaS clouds

Task 7

SCOM security and privacy issues

The System Centre Operation Manager(SCOM) provides a cross-platform data center for monitoring all the OS and the data centers. It does this by providing a single user interface that provides reports on the state, health, and performance of the computing systems. In addition, it provides alerts based on performance, availability, security, configuration,

Despite its beneficial use, the SCOM has some security and privacy issues as discussed below.

First, despite being good at reading logs, SCOM does not provide a foolproof management pack. It does not catch every intrusion into the network. This is because 100% of the time, it majorly depends on proper management of alerts. In terms of privacy, the SCOM agent-based monitoring tool violates the right to uncensored monitoring of user activities. The agent runs around the networking spying on user actions (Carstensen, Golden, & Morgenthal, 2012).

Task 8

To help address this issues in the private cloud, the bottler’s company should set up a good alert management process to ensure there is an end to end management of alerts to resolve them as soon as possible before they turn into real problems.

Task 9

Migration plan

Deployment architecture

The following diagram shows the proposed architectural diagram for the cloud using the Azure cloud framework

In architecture, the Users and consumers shall be able to access the web services, SaaS and other azure services via an HTTP request which shall get authenticated via the Azure directory service. Only authorized users shall be able to access the underlying network services and software.

Component Diagram 

The following diagram shows the component diagram for the proposed migration

Operation Model

The above diagram shows the various operations and how different option available to integrate well with the proposed cloud platform migration

Task 10

Role of substitution strings

The substitution strings are widely used in defining a template for cross-platform notification messages. The Azure platform has a set of notification hubs that uses the substitution strings to transform a platform-dependent notification message into a more cross-platform template that can be sued to send platform-independent notification messages (Al-Zoubi & Al-Masaiid, 2019).

In this approach, the actual message gets substituted with the expressions templates. The templates get filled with the message based on a  JSON file that can hold multiple templates. This approach of sending notification using the substitution strings in the message body of the notification allows more personalized experience in using apps on the Azure platform.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this report provides more insights into the benefits of cloud computing by explaining what each delivery model can positively impact company operations. The report further provides some security and privacy issues that are associated with the cloud platform. For each concern, a more elaborate method to avert the risk of the issues is addressed. And finally, a project plan detailing a migration plan to Microsoft azure is discussed

Summary

This report highly recommends bottlers company to go the hybrid way to reap the benefits that accrue to the cloud environment while maintaining a high level of control and personalization of services offered by having a private cloud.

The report recommends none sensitive services such as web and software that can be deployed on the web to be migrated to the public to cut cost and provide wide coverage

Server virtualization is highly recommended for the bottler company to efficiently utilize the available physical and virtual resources at the companies disposal

References

• Al-Zoubi, A. M., & Al-Masaiid, I. (2019). Confidence Crisis in the Application of Cloud Computing in the Industrial Companies in Jordan a Field Study. Journal of Accounting, Business & Management, 26(1), 1–20.
• Carstensen, J., Golden, B., & Morgenthal, J. (2012). Cloud Computing : Assessing the Risks. Ely: IT Governance Publishing.
• Goscinski, A., Broberg, J., & Buyya, R. (2011). Cloud computing : principles and paradigms. Wiley. (Bulle Library 005).
• Kathuria, A., Mann, A., Khuntia, J., Saldanha, T. J. V., & Kauffman, R. J. (2018). A Strategic Value Appropriation Path for Cloud Computing. Journal of Management Information Systems, 35(3), 740–775. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2018.1481635
• Pise, V. H. (2019). Cloud Computing – Recent Trends in Information Technology. ANWESH: International Journal of Management & Information Technology, 4(1), 27–29.
• Yu, Y., Cao, R. Q., & Schniederjans, D. (2017). Cloud computing and its impact on service level: a multi-agent simulation model. International Journal of Production Research, 55(15), 4341–4353. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2016.1251624
• Zeqiri, A., Aliu, L., Kostanica, F., & Prenaj, B. (2017). An empirical investigation of cloud computing usage in education. Una Investigación Empírica Del Uso de La Computación En La Nube En La Educación., (285/286), 77–85. https://doi.org/10.3917/rsg.285.0077