Case Study: Cloud Computing - Research Paper Example

In addition, the AWS has hosting centers at various regions and this feature assists Ericsson to obtain advantages in terms of remote access. The well developed network of host centers also benefits the organisation to trim down its costs. The features like advanced automation and global hosting are greatly helpful for Ericsson to achieve competitive benefits with respect to automated software updates. Amazon EC2 As described in Amazon web services (n.d.), The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalability within minutes based on a pay-as-you-go method.

In addition, EC2 significantly reduces the time needed to get and boot new services instances and this feature enables users to rapidly scale capacity in accordance with changes in computing requirements. While using Amazon EC2, users need to pay for only the capacity they actually use. It also promotes the development of failure resilient applications and avoids common failure scenarios noticeably (Amazon web services). Amazon S3 As notified in its website, Amazon Simple Storage Services or Amazon S3 has been designed for making Web-scale computing easier.

Amazon S3 is characterized with a simple Web services interface that has the capacity to store and retrieve huge amount as and when required. The major feature of Amazon S3 is that Amazon provides developers with access to its own highly scalable, fast, reliable and cost effective data storage infrastructure. Amazon S3 specifically tries to improve the advantages of scale. This service is highly flexible so that it is easy to add functional layers further. Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement guarantees the reliability of this service.

Here, users need to pay only for what they use (Amazon web services). RightScale RightScale is really helpful for organisations to effectively manage key business-related applications with regard to private, public, and hybrid clouds; and improved configuration, automation, monitoring, and governance are the major features of RightScale (RightScale Cloud Management, n.d.). It performs well in terms of manageability and dependability. As RightScale is portable, it offers greater degree of freedom and flexibility (RightScale Cloud Management).

Security concerns for cloud based services As Barnes (2010) points out, there are many potential security concerns for cloud-based services; and among them, major security concerns are data location, data segregation, regulatory compliance, privileged user access, recovery, investigative support, and long-term viability. Possibly, the organization cannot detect the actual location of the cloud as it can be far away from the organization’s physical location. Often, it seems that organization’s data in the cloud are mixed with other firms’ data.

Regulatory compliance indicates that the organization is fully responsible for the integrity and security of its own data (Barnes, 2010). Since vendor employees have access to cloud, security level of the firm’s data is challenged. Long term viability is another major factor affecting the security of cloud based services. The ‘layered approach’ can be used to increase the security level of cloud based services (Jordan, 2012). As Barnes (2010) states, the layered approach promotes defense at various levels.

First, physical security is necessary for monitoring and protecting the space where servers and other physical equipments are