CIS-500 Week 1 Case Study 2: Cloud Computing
Case Study 2: Cloud Computing
Bradley Wallace
Strayer University
Professor Mark Cohen
CIS-500
November 30, 2014
.
Over a span of several years, Amazon.com has progressively positioned itself as a competitive technology company through a series of services referred to as Amazon Web Services (AWS). These are services in which Amazon rents out parts of its back-end infrastructure to other IT organizations and developers (New York Times, 2010) since 90% of it was being unused. They offer a number of benefits such as cost-effectiveness, dependability, flexibility, and comprehension. The competitive AWS products in which Amazon emphasized were Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Ericsson was able to instantly take advantage of Amazon’s resources. Amazon’s AWS is able to build and manage a global infrastructure to the scale Ericsson needed to support their …show more content…
business. This infrastructure already brings Cost-effectiveness to Ericsson due to “No up-front payments, No long-term contracts. Customers pay only for actual usage of services with help of their credit card (Pay as you go).” They had the ability to deploy new applications and automated software updates instantly because they were able to scale up and down as demand changed or the business required it. They could access their cloud from anywhere thanks to the freedom of remote access. It can supply millions of transactions per minute. A lot of commodity hardware that can pick up in case of some technical failures on the other hardware. (Always-on and self-healing infrastructure) The web services provided Ericsson with a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform with data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Singapore, and Japan. “The Ericsson team states that having hosting centers in various regions was important for them. AWS also showed a better quality of service with solid management and a proven track record.” (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a complete environment, a processor, memory, and preconfigured software. It reduces the time need to obtain and boot new server in a significant high speed. As a result, customers are allowed to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. With Amazon EC2, customer will be benefitted from policy that pays only for using capacity in real time. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Amazon S3 is simply storage for the Internet. Its design helps developers easily to access Web-scale computing. It is easily used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet thanks to a simple Web services interface. Any developer can access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers. Amazon S3 is so flexible that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Reliability is backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement. As with most cloud services, you pay for what you use. (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Rightscale is considered as a bridge between your applications and your cloud infrastructure. Rightscale cloud management enables organizations to easily accomplish and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. Right Scale provides efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications. (Crunch Base, 2012) One of its features enables the user to monitor, scale, and manage entire server deployments efficiently and reliably. (Rightscale Cloud Management, 2012). It offers the freedom and flexibility to keep a business from getting locked into a single provider because it is portable. (Amazon Web Services, 2012) There are several potential security concerns with regard to cloud-based services.
Trust is not easily defined, but most people agree that when it comes to cloud computing, transparency is essential to creating trust. Businesses must be able to see cloud service providers are complying with agreed data security standards and practices. These must include controls around who has access to data, staff security vetting practices, and the technologies and processes to segregate, backup and delete data. Suppliers of cloud technologies and services are quick to claim that cloud computing is well equipped to provide the necessary controls. Virtualization, they argue, underlies cloud computing, and therein lies the potential to achieve hitherto impossible levels of security. While virtualization is viewed with suspicion and fear by many IT directors, suppliers like RSA, IBM and other say that the technology enables organizations to build security into the infrastructure and automate security processes, to surpass traditional data protection
levels.
Aside from all the positive spin around cloud computing technologies, a trusted, standard model of cloud computing that will enable faster rates and higher levels of adoption is still a long way off, with relatively little progress being made in that regard in the past year, says William Beer, director of OneSecurity at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Despite some isolated progress on the technology front, many organizations already using cloud-based services are motivated mainly by the cost savings they can achieve. It will take a significant data breach by a cloud services provider, he believes, before consumers of cloud services will realize the inadequacy of current models and demand better safeguards around their corporate data. Many times, the organization’s data and information in the cloud reside alongside other companies’ data. There should be a clear delineation and segregation of that information through any number of encryption techniques. Furthermore, the organization should insist that whatever encryption scheme is utilized, it is designed and tested by experienced specialists. The vendor should offer a specified plan of action to the organization in the event of a disaster. A specific and detailed disaster recovery plan should be in place as part of the agreement between both parties.
Any agreement or contract should include the availability of, and allowance for, a third-party investigation in the event of a specific problem requiring investigation. The agreement should allow specific information to be locked down at the organization’s request; the vendor should not be allowed to destroy or change such information. Access to metadata can confirm the unaltered state of the information.
The primary vehicle for cloud infrastructure is virtualization. This equates to running virtual servers in large data centers removing the need to buy and maintain expensive hardware and sharing Infrastructure resources. Cloud storage offers a number of benefits, such as the ability to store and retrieve large amounts of data in any location at any time. Data storage services are fast, inexpensive, and very scalable, but, reliability can be an issue. Every system at some time experiences down-time. Another possible issue could be the cost of developing the application to synchronize data between the application and the Cloud. Choosing to support both an offline and online experience for the end users will add additional cost to the project.(Chantry, 2009) “Although promising cost efficiency with its "pay as you need" model, the cost of implementing cloud computing can skyrocket when the expense of reliable and secure connectivity with sufficient bandwidth delivered via private WANs” (Gottlieb, 2011). Investigate the number of service interruptions your service provider has experienced. Look at the security concerns and remember to scrutinize the contracts for any additional costs that could arise.
Systems such as these can be implemented in phases to bring certain departments and processes on line in their order of importance. Like service interruptions, it is just a matter of time. Being able to stay on top of change in this age of business is essential for success. Platforms like the one Amazon offers has allowed many business’s like Ericsson thrive.
References
Amazon Web Services (2012) About AWS. Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/
Business Day. (2013, May 18). New York Times. Retrieved from: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/amazon_inc/index.html Chantry, D. (2009) Mapping Applications to the Cloud. Retrieved from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd430340.aspx
Crunch Base (2012). Retrieved from: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/rightscale
Gottlieb, A. (2011) Cloud Computing Journal: Beware the Network Cost Gotchas of Cloud
Computing. Retrieved from: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1872933
Rightscale Cloud Management (2012) A Bridge between Your Apps and Infrastructure. Retrieved from: http://www.rightscale.com/products/
Bradley Wallace
Strayer University
Professor Mark Cohen
CIS-500
November 30, 2014
.
Over a span of several years, Amazon.com has progressively positioned itself as a competitive technology company through a series of services referred to as Amazon Web Services (AWS). These are services in which Amazon rents out parts of its back-end infrastructure to other IT organizations and developers (New York Times, 2010) since 90% of it was being unused. They offer a number of benefits such as cost-effectiveness, dependability, flexibility, and comprehension. The competitive AWS products in which Amazon emphasized were Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Ericsson was able to instantly take advantage of Amazon’s resources. Amazon’s AWS is able to build and manage a global infrastructure to the scale Ericsson needed to support their …show more content…
business. This infrastructure already brings Cost-effectiveness to Ericsson due to “No up-front payments, No long-term contracts. Customers pay only for actual usage of services with help of their credit card (Pay as you go).” They had the ability to deploy new applications and automated software updates instantly because they were able to scale up and down as demand changed or the business required it. They could access their cloud from anywhere thanks to the freedom of remote access. It can supply millions of transactions per minute. A lot of commodity hardware that can pick up in case of some technical failures on the other hardware. (Always-on and self-healing infrastructure) The web services provided Ericsson with a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform with data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Singapore, and Japan. “The Ericsson team states that having hosting centers in various regions was important for them. AWS also showed a better quality of service with solid management and a proven track record.” (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a complete environment, a processor, memory, and preconfigured software. It reduces the time need to obtain and boot new server in a significant high speed. As a result, customers are allowed to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. With Amazon EC2, customer will be benefitted from policy that pays only for using capacity in real time. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Amazon S3 is simply storage for the Internet. Its design helps developers easily to access Web-scale computing. It is easily used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet thanks to a simple Web services interface. Any developer can access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers. Amazon S3 is so flexible that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Reliability is backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement. As with most cloud services, you pay for what you use. (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
Rightscale is considered as a bridge between your applications and your cloud infrastructure. Rightscale cloud management enables organizations to easily accomplish and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. Right Scale provides efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications. (Crunch Base, 2012) One of its features enables the user to monitor, scale, and manage entire server deployments efficiently and reliably. (Rightscale Cloud Management, 2012). It offers the freedom and flexibility to keep a business from getting locked into a single provider because it is portable. (Amazon Web Services, 2012) There are several potential security concerns with regard to cloud-based services.
Trust is not easily defined, but most people agree that when it comes to cloud computing, transparency is essential to creating trust. Businesses must be able to see cloud service providers are complying with agreed data security standards and practices. These must include controls around who has access to data, staff security vetting practices, and the technologies and processes to segregate, backup and delete data. Suppliers of cloud technologies and services are quick to claim that cloud computing is well equipped to provide the necessary controls. Virtualization, they argue, underlies cloud computing, and therein lies the potential to achieve hitherto impossible levels of security. While virtualization is viewed with suspicion and fear by many IT directors, suppliers like RSA, IBM and other say that the technology enables organizations to build security into the infrastructure and automate security processes, to surpass traditional data protection
levels.
Aside from all the positive spin around cloud computing technologies, a trusted, standard model of cloud computing that will enable faster rates and higher levels of adoption is still a long way off, with relatively little progress being made in that regard in the past year, says William Beer, director of OneSecurity at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Despite some isolated progress on the technology front, many organizations already using cloud-based services are motivated mainly by the cost savings they can achieve. It will take a significant data breach by a cloud services provider, he believes, before consumers of cloud services will realize the inadequacy of current models and demand better safeguards around their corporate data. Many times, the organization’s data and information in the cloud reside alongside other companies’ data. There should be a clear delineation and segregation of that information through any number of encryption techniques. Furthermore, the organization should insist that whatever encryption scheme is utilized, it is designed and tested by experienced specialists. The vendor should offer a specified plan of action to the organization in the event of a disaster. A specific and detailed disaster recovery plan should be in place as part of the agreement between both parties.
Any agreement or contract should include the availability of, and allowance for, a third-party investigation in the event of a specific problem requiring investigation. The agreement should allow specific information to be locked down at the organization’s request; the vendor should not be allowed to destroy or change such information. Access to metadata can confirm the unaltered state of the information.
The primary vehicle for cloud infrastructure is virtualization. This equates to running virtual servers in large data centers removing the need to buy and maintain expensive hardware and sharing Infrastructure resources. Cloud storage offers a number of benefits, such as the ability to store and retrieve large amounts of data in any location at any time. Data storage services are fast, inexpensive, and very scalable, but, reliability can be an issue. Every system at some time experiences down-time. Another possible issue could be the cost of developing the application to synchronize data between the application and the Cloud. Choosing to support both an offline and online experience for the end users will add additional cost to the project.(Chantry, 2009) “Although promising cost efficiency with its "pay as you need" model, the cost of implementing cloud computing can skyrocket when the expense of reliable and secure connectivity with sufficient bandwidth delivered via private WANs” (Gottlieb, 2011). Investigate the number of service interruptions your service provider has experienced. Look at the security concerns and remember to scrutinize the contracts for any additional costs that could arise.
Systems such as these can be implemented in phases to bring certain departments and processes on line in their order of importance. Like service interruptions, it is just a matter of time. Being able to stay on top of change in this age of business is essential for success. Platforms like the one Amazon offers has allowed many business’s like Ericsson thrive.
References
Amazon Web Services (2012) About AWS. Retrieved from http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/
Business Day. (2013, May 18). New York Times. Retrieved from: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/amazon_inc/index.html Chantry, D. (2009) Mapping Applications to the Cloud. Retrieved from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd430340.aspx
Crunch Base (2012). Retrieved from: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/rightscale
Gottlieb, A. (2011) Cloud Computing Journal: Beware the Network Cost Gotchas of Cloud
Computing. Retrieved from: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1872933
Rightscale Cloud Management (2012) A Bridge between Your Apps and Infrastructure. Retrieved from: http://www.rightscale.com/products/