Topic: The organization should concerned about both business and technical issues when implementing cloud computing technology
Lecturer’s Name: David Johnstone
Date: 14th August, 2016
Word Count: 1555
Abstract
This world is now turning into a big village because of the cloud technology is growth so rapidly at recent decades. This essay intends to describe the business and technical issues within the cloud computing technology, and explain why the organization should both concern business and technical issues when they implement cloud service in three different areas – ease of use, cloud performance, and security and privacy.
Introduction
The concept of cloud computing was first introduced around 1950s, and it became a disruptive technology to take a place in new information technology service compared with the traditional computational methodologies before the term of cloud innovated (Johnstone, 2016) [1]. Although cloud computing should be concerned in the business perspective, it also widened the gap between technical and industrial aspect, which it can lead to serious issues. There are three immediate motivations might impact the organization to choose cloud computing technology whether or not in their business long-term planning when they consider about both business and technical issues, which include the organization deploy the cloud computing is based on ease of use, the organization should consider cloud performance when they choose cloud service provider, and the cloud computing platform should consider security and privacy issue. This essay will discuss these issues to explain the relationship between the organization and cloud computing in business and technical perspectives.
Discussion
The terminology of technical requirement is concerned both hardware and software, which it will further address these issues within following discussion. First of all, when the organization deploy the cloud computing service should base on the term of ease of use, which means that the organization should consider the form of accessibility and availability of the cloud computing service. Gupta, Seetharaman & Raj (2013) indicated that software could help small and medium business (SMBs) to manage their e-mail service, software deployment and other related assets services. The example of Dell cloud service provides such service to SMBs, which they provide customized service to SMBs to help the organization to deploy their business system [2]. The business suit software or commercial software specially designed or customized for business could help quickly deploy their service without providing extra cost or support, because they outsourced such service to a third party service provider. For example, Victoria University of Wellington use Microsoft Office 365 to deploy the software and service to both students and staffs, which include e-mail management software, word and data processing software, cloud storage service and online video conferencing software (http://www.victoria.ac.nz/its/student-services/software). Both students and staffs could use their e-mail account to download and use such services that described before from their e-mail web service interface. As a result, university could quickly help student to install the office software on their personal computer without provide extra cost to licencing software, because university use Microsoft cloud service to manage their service with student e-mail account, which every student assigned with a unique school e-mail account once they fully enrolled at university. In addition, Yang & Tate (2012) shows that one of cloud computing services provide to the customer is IaaS, also known as Infrastructure-as-a-service, which such cloud infrastructure gives a full or limited control to user, like operating system and applications [3]. Gupta, Seetharaman & Raj (2013) also shows that user can simply use their login authentication information to access clod service from anywhere on any device [2]. For instance, Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud services are available to the public user, and they provide a remote interface to help the user to set up their personal server with just couple of clicks. Furthermore, cloud service also helps the organization deploy their service or system with minimum financial support and reduce cost of upgrading hardware device. According to Gupta, Seetharaman & Raj (2013), when small and medium enterprises (SMEs) moved from PC-based infrastructure to cloud based service, it can avoid cost of sustaining hardware upgrade or even no front-end system capital investment, especially, upgrade hardware components in order to maintain the service and system [2]. Marston, Li, Bandyopadhyay, Zhang & Ghalsasi (2011) also argued that the organization cloud avoids or reduce unnecessary hardware expense to deploy the service, so they can put these capital investments into their business structure work and put more time on business market [4].
Secondly, the organization should consider the cloud performance based on their enterprise scale when they choose cloud service provider. There has differences between how much money that spend on the cloud infrastructure and service performance that the organization required. Gupta, Seetharaman & Raj (2013) stated that the organization should choose an appropriate cloud service provider based on the demand for service in order to avoid over-budget problem [2]. For example, Amazon allow the user to choose different cloud platform based on machine configuration, storage capacity and network usage. For a large organization, they should choose a better operating system and system layout, larger storage and high bandwidth compared with a small or medium organization. But one benefit for choosing cloud infrastructure is that the scalability of cloud service, which means the organization can change their cloud service anytime based on their demand. Furthermore, a recent study shows that cloud performance is one of major technological issue in related cloud computing research articles, and one of significant reason of user switch to cloud computing is performance improvement that provided by cloud service provider (Yang & Tate, 2012) [3]. As an example, one of cloud computing services is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which enable software developers to work collaborate with others during the process of information system development. Additionally, Marston, Li, Bandyopadhyay, Zhang & Ghalsasi (2011) shows that the organization should also decide how to adopt cloud service into their business perspective, especially, how technology adopted and implemented within the organization. They also indicated that if the organization already have in-house applications, they should find the best approach to integrate their in-house applications with cloud applications [4]. For example, Microsoft use OneDrive to allow user access their business application both remotely and locally, and Apple also launched a similar cloud service called iCloud that also allow users working on their documents within different platform.
Finally, the organization or cloud service provider should also consider security and privacy when deploy the service or system. The biggest concern around cloud computing is security and privacy issues, which it determines the willingness of people chooses cloud service. Gupta, Seetharaman & Raj (2013) introduced four different cloud deployment models based on the demand of cloud service, which included public cloud, private cloud, community cloud and hybrid cloud [2]. One example shows that the US government use two cloud models to implement their service public users, which private cloud for isolating the internal environment from the external public world, and community cloud is used to provide service to public users. According to Yang & Tate (2012) study, another technological issue that the organization concerned is security, which involved in two different areas – data security and network security, like data encryption, software authorization, and Dos attack detection and defence [3]. The security issue is more concerned about software problem, like what network protocol used to protect plain-text data, and what kind of firewall to protect outside attack. For example, Victoria University of Wellington offers staff VPN (Virtual Private Network) service that allows them to safely access resources from their off-campus personal computer (http://www.victoria.ac.nz/its/staff-services/self-help/faq-vpn). And also, such myVic and Blackboard online system is performed with https protocol, which it can provide a secure communication over the Internet. In addition, a recent study shows that one of threat of cloud computing is the organization might have a lack of control of their operation, which bring the concern of security issue because there has no or lack of industry standards for cloud computing (Marston, Li, Bandyopadhyay, Zhang & Ghalsasi, 2011) [4]. Yang & Tate (2012) also indicated that privacy issue could address from ethical or legal views, because user will be bound to upload and store their files on remote cloud service, and their business and personal information are managed by third parties, which they could not 100% guaranteed there not data leakage [3]. For this perspective, there have three ways to prevent security problems in cloud computing industry: (1) detect possible intrusions, which provide first line of defence to prevent possible attack by using activity or traffic monitor to block any unusual network traffic, or using log to identify possible intrusions; (2) the second line of defence is using identify management to control user, which it can make sure the data is accessible for certain or assigned users; and (3) the third line of defence is using access control management to authenticate user, for example, the device must be authorized before login, also known as the term of two-factor authentication.
Conclusion
There have been many business and technical issues discovered during the process of cloud computing deployment, and there has been difficult to address these issues with either business or technical perspectives. However, three advantages that could help the organization choose cloud computing technology when they want to switch to cloud infrastructure from local application. The challenge is how to identify the specific business and technical issues for their business planning, and how to choose the best clouding solution to meet their business concerns. Following suggestions might help the organization to determine the right cloud computing service: (1) using an appropriate business analysis methodology to identify the requirements and issues that exists within the organization; (2) simulate the cloud service before use or deploy it; and (3) find the best approach to adopted the cloud applications with the local applications. In this way, cloud computing technology could solve the problem of business and technical issues within the organization.
References
[1] Johnstone, D. (2016, July 26). INFO 402 – Week 3 – Cloud Computing. Unpublished lecture notes, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
[2] Gupta, P., Seetharaman, A., & Raj, J. (2013). The usage and adoption of cloud computing by small and medium businesses. International Journal of Information Management, 33(5), 861-874.
[3] Yang, H., & Tate, M. (2012). A descriptive literature review and classification of cloud computing research. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 31(1), 35-60.
[4] Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., & Ghalsasi, A. (2011). Cloud computing - the business perspective. Decision Support Systems, 51(1), 176-189.
