CASE STUDY : SHOULD BUSINESSES MOVE TO THE CLOUD

MEMBERS OF GROUP 13:

HAJI ZULKIFFLEE B. HJ. SOFEE - P13D136PHAJI NASSERUDDIN B. HJ. ABDUL JABAR - P13D142PCHONG MIN FATT - P13D154P

INTRODUCTION Cloud computing is a model of computing in which computer processing, storage, software, and other services are provided as a pool of virtualized resources over a network, primarily the Internet. These clouds of computing resources can be accessed on an as-needed basis from any connected device and location. The term "Cloud Computing" has appeared on the radar screen of information systems/information technology and business professionals over the last few years. The term "Cloud" refers to the Internet and "Computing" refers to the use of technology.

In 2009 the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory developed a considered and well-written definition distilled from a number of perspectives. Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics. The essential characteristic are on demand self services, ubiquitous network access, location independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured services. Cloud computing consists of three different types of services.

The types are infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service. Deployment models are private cloud, community cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. The emerging cloud abstracts infrastructure complexities of servers, applications, data, and heterogeneous platforms.

QUESTION 1 : WHAT BUSINESS BENEFITS DO CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES PROVIDE?

WHAT PROBLEMS DO THEY SOLVE?

Cloud computing has become a standard method of software operation for many businesses. It offers many significant advantages, such as a potential cost savings, ease of sharing data and applications, quickly find the desired information, automatic backups, reduced support and maintenance costs and improve the efficiencies.

ANSWER: 

In the case they give us an example which uses cloud computing at the marketplace that is Amazon. Amazon they use the Web services division (AWS) to get flexible computing power and data storage. This cloud application helps Amazon get a large amount of computing resources. According to the customer provided information, the AWS can help Amazon separate, allocate and arrange these resources. The AWS also can help Amazon’s computing resources. On the one hand, Cloud computing has brought a lot of convenience for Amazon, making them save costs and increase profits.

Moreover, cloud computing let Amazon spend more time on other work which had more value. Because of that using cloud computing can store large amounts of data and information, many companies are using cloud computing. Cloud computing helps us build a large database, and can help us to quickly find the desired information. This improves the work efficiency. “Big Data analytical techniques are being used to deliver more detailed data and deliver it quicker”(Top 10 business reasons to move to the cloud). Another example for using the cloud is that it can help the company save cost, like the Outback company who used the cloud “to avoid taxing in-house system unnecessarily”.

In the case, the Zynga Company uses cloud computing to automatic backup data and transmits data. “Storing information in the cloud gives you almost unlimited storage capacity” (Cloud Computing - Is it Really All That Beneficial?). Cloud computing also can reduce support and maintenance costs by storing large amount of data and information as backup to improve the efficiencies.

When a new game is in the test phase and the company is not sure how many customers, they use the Amazon cloud. “Then once game traffic stabilizes and reaches a steady number, they would move the game on to their private zcloud”.

This cloud transfer can help the Zynga Company solve the space storage problems, and only pay for the resources it ends up using. Using the cloud to transfer one game’s large data is easier than using other old applications. In the case, the InterContinental company use the cloud to provide customers with more convenient services. According to use the cloud, the InterContinental company lets their customers receive data faster if the data is located on a server that is physically close to them. With the development of society, more and more multinational companies are using the cloud, not only because of cost savings, but because people worldwide can access the cloud, provided they have an Internet connection.

Using the cloud computing, the two major disadvantages are security and reliability. In this case study, Amazon's cloud service has shown significant outages in 2011 and 2012, causing serious consequences. There are many large sites are using Amazon's cloud computing, so Amazon's cloud computing failure will not only affect Amazon, but also spread to many other companies and have a great impact on them. It also because the user loses control over the software application and becomes dependent on the provider to maintain, update and manage it. If something goes wrong, the user does not have direct access to the software and must depend on the provider to fix the problem. If the provider is unresponsive or unable to fix the problem quickly, the user can experience significant issues. According to the Paris International Group of a report, after investigation they found that each year there are about ten hours or more the server fails.

QUESTION 2 : What are the disadvantages of cloud computing?

. Another important issue is security. By using a cloud system, your company’s sensitive data and information will be stored on third-party servers, and you will probably have very limited knowledge or control regarding this information. If the provider has inadequate security or encryption systems or procedures, or if a breach of these systems or procedures occurs for any reason, your company’s private and confidential data may become compromised. This could have devastating effects, and could cause legal problems for your company if third party confidential information (for example, customer information) is compromised.

Capacity planning is defined as the process of predicting when a computer hardware system becomes saturated to ensure that adequate computing resources are available for work of different priorities and that the firm has enough computing power for its current and future needs. Indeed, Amazon must plan its future needs to be capable of providing sufficient computing power for both AWS and Amazon retail services, a lack of which will result in the a fore mentioned rejection by subscribers. 

QUESTION 3 : How do the concepts of capacity planning, scalability, and TCO apply to this case? Apply these concepts both to Amazon and to subscribers of its services.

Related to capacity planning is scalability, which is defined as the ability of a computer, product, or system to expand to serve a large number of users without breaking down. Scalability is a ability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work in capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. Scalability relates to both Amazon and AWS subscribers. Amazon must be able to provide its customers with services that are scalable, as it claims to do on its website: “Take advantage of our massive compute capacity and storage to build whatever kinds of applications your business demands, no matter how fast it grows or how big it gets”. 

Total Cost Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyer and owners determine the direct and indirect cost of a product or system.

Amazon must provide hardware capacity planning and scalability. With the development of information technology, Amazon will have more and more customers. Not just Amazon, but Amazon's customer requires a large database to store a variety of data and information. This will help the company grow. Amazon must bear the total TCO of its services, while Amazon is also needed to maintain the profitability of the company. However, the services' subscribers benefit from not having to worry about these issues.

As information technology and social development, there have been more and more companies need cloud services. First, the information Internet companies need to use cloud services, such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, Blogspot, Ebay, etc. Because the cloud computing can store large information, and share the information. Second, large multinational corporations, one of the advantages about the cloud computing is that people from around the world can get a faster connection

QUESTION 4 : What kinds of businesses are most likely to benefit from using cloud Computing? Why?

Cloud services can help employees of multinational corporations to establish good communication channels and share the company's resources. This saves the cost of the work to help multinational companies, improve work efficiency. Meanwhile, cloud computing is not perfect, it is sometimes also appear outage. Therefore, it is recommended to use cloud computing company “would be a major risk consider using another computing service as a backup.” Enterprise-class business cloud services can be hugely beneficial, even for quite small businesses.

The  use  of  cloud  computing  utility  has  increased significantly  in  recent  years  and  it  appears  to  be  a  natural evolution  of  the  data  centre  to  execute  computing  and storage  in  a  more  scalable  way.  With  such  a  significant increase, the market is growing quickly and more companies are  providing  new  services  with  better  features,  including isolated services.

With  greater  flexibility,  lower  infrastructure  cost,  and lower  operations  overhead,  there’s  a  lot  to  love  about  a move  to  a  cloud  architecture  and  with  private  and  hybrid cloud  options  offering  all  the  control  and  transparency  an organization  could  want,  there’s  no  reason  to  fear  cloud computing anymore. We predict cloud computing will grow, so developers should take it into ac-count. 

Conclusion

Regardless of whether a cloud provider sells services at a low level of abstraction like EC2 or a higher level like AppEngine, we believe computing, storage, and networking must all focus on horizontal scalability of virtualized resources rather than on single node performance.

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