Cloud Computing - Wizni Incorporated - Case Study Example

of the of the 3 December Cloud Computing Cloud computing is considered to be a value driven technology, as it saves cost along with advanced Virtualization of business functions that is globally accessible. Organizations consider it a cost effective tool, as the requirement of maintaining a complex technology infrastructure along with resources is not essential. Likewise, risk factors are also being considered, as the risk, mentioned in the underpinning contract is now owned by a third party i.e. cloud computing vendors. In a nutshell, cloud computing delivers major advantages along with negative consequences as well. For instance, information of an organization needs to be protected and is the ultimate responsibility of the board of director for which they are also liable. We have selected a small medium enterprise called as ‘Wizni Incorporated’ this is transformed from a traditional IT service to a cloud service provider. The Information technology architecture of the company incorporates three components i.e. business analytics expertise, along with the provision of a quality cloud hosting provider. Likewise, the core competency of Wizni Inc. is business analytics. Moreover, the company is delivering business analytics bundled with powerful systems enabling their clients to make efficient decision making. Wizni Incorporated provides state of the art analytics solutions for empowering organizations to utilize business intelligence required for making efficient decision making. The company provides Business intelligence deployments that facilitate ease of discovery, patterns hidden in IT systems, applications and unstructured data. The business analytics products are DIFEE™ (data-inference and federation engine) and Score IT. DIFEE is used for virtualization and Score IT is used for data mining, model scoring and life cycle management. Furthermore, IBM Cognos Express is also a first integrated business intelligence tool that is precisely developed and acquired by the company to meet customer requirements. The tool is bundled with critical reporting, scorecard, analysis, budgeting, forecasting dashboard and customization features and capabilities for the small medium enterprises at an affordable cost without large associated investments. Moreover, the tool incorporates a pre-configured solution that is very easy for installation and use for the end users. The transition of this new powerful cloud solution is approved by the board on the basis of gaining competitive edge among small medium enterprises within the region. Previously, there was no growth in clientele and after implementing the cloud based solution, clientele sky rocketed and stakeholders were satisfied at the same time ready to invest in the technological solution. On the other hand, cloud computing also reflects significant risks, principal risks of cloud computing is associated with federal agencies and regulations. Any vulnerability found in the software, platform or infrastructure of the vendors will expose serious exposures, as information may be related to more than one organization. Moreover, employees working internally on the cloud computing premises of ‘Business Cloud’ may also expose a serious threat if no proper background employee checks were performed during recruitment procedures. Furthermore, if any governmental agencies for instance, military or other sensitive body is also using the same cloud from the same vendor is also most likely to be compromised, if any breach of any one of these fundamental concepts Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability is successful. In addition, the incident response function may not be efficient and effective if any incident occurs and affect the customer or employee. For instance, if a security incident affects the customer, the incident response function of the organization will trigger in a timely manner to isolate and investigate the root cause via root cause analysis. In a cloud computing scenario, it may be a different case and result in ambiguity, as from where the investigation should begin. If an incident is triggered from the vendor’s site, evidence is required to act accordingly and may consume more time that is always a critical success factor. Therefore, compliance of cloud computing vendors and implementing security controls as per the governmental information security requirements is the major concern of organizations associated with services on clouds. Moreover, organizations have also concerns on assessment of security controls and independent audit and limitations of the vendor because data of many organizations are located at the vendor site that may increase risk of the CIA. Therefore, an agreement is in process for establishing an independent organization that may conduct security audits and assessment. In this way, organizations can select vendors who are approved by these independent organizations maintaining the required security controls and standards. Cloud computing continues to benefit business by lowering down the cost associated with hardware, software and human resource. However, some of the debatable issues including personal privacy, lack of security control and sharing data are still seeking a solution. Likewise, providing superior benefits for ease of development, minimized costs, high scalability along with next generation architecture are facilitating Information technology to evaluate cost benefit analysis while doing risk assessment. At the same time, open source has played a vital role in cloud computing and facilitated to enable low cost input that can also be considered as free of cost and rich features for cloud service providers. Moreover, buzz in the industry concludes that the cloud computing service will utilize the open source to gain power and control to establish next generation proprietary platform-as-a service that is similar to Web 2.0. For achieving optimal benefits from Information technology, IT must be aligned with business objectives via strategic alignment, value delivery, risk management, resource management and performance management. The reason for selecting Wizni Incorporated is the acquisition of most up to date technology i.e. cloud computing supporting business analytics. By focusing on agile solution methods, that company will facilitate organizations to gain insights and competitive advantage that is a key objective for any organization. Moreover, the most positive factor of the company is the focus on key business objectives. In contrast to cloud computing, a more advanced and extended form of technology is Next Generation Business Analytics that facilitates organizations to analyze massive data available in large data sets collected by automated information systems and applications. Moreover, these next generation technologies cover the below mentioned three aspects that were not covered by previous technologies: Detailed operational data on one location for thorough in-depth analysis IT development efforts are required and related lead times to produce and maintain standards and ad hoc reports No provision of ‘easy to use’ tools for end users A comparison of cloud computing with virtualization technology has a major difference. The virtual environment requires a facility with adequate temperature controlled environment. Moreover, servers with multiple processor cores are also required to execute more than one instances of an operating system virtually but physically on a single machine. Moreover, Storage area network is also essential for effective data communication within these virtual loaded images. Security is also a primary concern, as a breach in any one of the virtual clusters may result in a downtime of several systems. Furthermore, a full time employee or a vendor contract is required for configuring, developing and maintaining the infrastructure operational. Whereas, cloud computing technology minimize several risk factors, as Marketing headlines from the vendor side always highlights a promise of provisioning private cloud. However, the requirement of private cloud derives more, as business and cultural relationships are changed for facilitating them for evolution of public and private cloud computing. Moreover, business relationships with trading partners are also affected by cloud computing technological evolution, as they are expected to frequent change. 2 Current Trends Since 1990’s, millions are invested and contributed in the information technology sector and the cloud computing domain. In the 1980’s, a popular slogan named as ‘Network is a computer’ publically emerged (O'Reilly and O’Reilly). Moreover, SaaS enabled services were already offered on salesforce.com since 1999. In the current era, cloud computing represents advanced and dynamic approach for offering online service with cloud based operating systems. One of the Microsoft products named as ‘Azure’ empowers an online operating system integrated with development functions and tools. Moreover, one of the tools named as ‘Google Docs’ enables online word processing facilities with incorporated spreadsheets and presentation tools. Additionally, another online product named as ‘Google Apps’ enables developers to create new programs and applications on the infrastructure provided by Google. Furthermore, Sun Microsystems enables online computing facilities for $1 per hour for one central processing unit. EC2 and S3 also provides online web services, as Yahoo has also decided to incorporate ‘Apache Hadoop Framework’ for enabling online users to utilize one million bytes of data on more than thousand nodes. Consequently, cloud computing has enabled services on the web for small medium enterprises and corporate organizations with high return on investment (ROI) (Sitaram and Manjunath ). 2.1 Cloud Computing Layers Cloud computing is associated with five layers, which lays the foundation of an architecture. These layers contribute functionality with each other to support the features of cloud computing services. The hardware layer has no fault tolerance concluding that if the hardware fails, there is no alternate except to replace it with the new one. The redundancy and fault tolerance is managed by the applications. However, the risk can be minimized by providing alternative power supplies to the hardware etc. The Virtualization layer comprises of virtual machines. However, these software applications use a single hardware platform but are presented in many instances. The mainstream server is virtualized by this method, and vendors can provide Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to the customers. VMware, Citrix, Microsoft is the popular ones. The IaaS acts as a layer of the cloud computing technology by illustrating a mechanism to administer the services of Virtualization. Moreover, the API allows the users to construct templates, which can be deleted anytime. The administration of API facilitates the vendors to save cost. Furthermore, IaaS facilitates storage services that are administered by an API. For instance, Amazon has implemented IaaS storage services for its customers. The next layer is the PaaS layer that facilitates the IaaS layer by eliminating the management of specific virtual machine instances. PaaS also contributes in the deployment of an application in cloud computing. A programming interface is made available for the developer to develop API. One of the examples of PaaS is the Google application engine in which Google has demonstrated an API utilized for storage and database along with a platform. PaaS provides the platform for the developers to code a program and initialize it in the cloud. SaaS has its significance on organizations, which do not want to possess or maintain any application in their premises. Email services, customer relationship management (CRM) services are accessible online via the cloud. The storage and security is the responsibility of the vendor. However, user credentials are required to log in the application on the Internet or a VPN connection. In this way, organizations save the application maintenance cost, cost of physical security measures, security measures etc. 3 Cloud Computing Storage The storage of cloud computing requires a lot of space, in fact, humongous data centers where data is collected and managed. These data centers pose several threats and security risk that may impact these data storage machines. The threat may be from a professional hacker and also in the form of the cloud provider itself, if data is not adequately managed. A minor security incident or misconfiguration can lead to a system failure or unavailability. For instance, in 2008, only a tiny corrupted bit integrated with a message that is utilized by the servers of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) that provide services of online data storage imposed a system shutdown for many hours (Tipton and Nozaki ). Moreover, another security breach occurred in 2009, password of an employee working on Twitter was compromised, resulting in breaching the email security questions page that was located in the Google apps account (Dannen and White). In relation to that, one more incident occurred when data was erased from one million T-mobile smart phones due to a server failure that was managing the data of these smart phones. As Peter Mell, who is leading a cloud security team at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says, public cloud computing models are more vulnerable to threats, as every customer has access to a broad range of services and levels. Therefore, if any one of the services is breached, they gain access to all the data. 4 Cloud Computing Security By its vast advantages, cloud computing is now considered the most cost effective option, as employees can connect to critical and non-critical business applications only from a generic Internet connection. However, online threats are also probable for the connection between the organizations and cloud computing providers. One of the threats compromised ‘Google Apps’, as it was hacked by Chinese hackers. The security and privacy in cloud computing are associated with data storage and data protection. Moreover, monitoring the utilization of resources available on the cloud by the service providers is also included. In order to secure the data in the cloud, it can be stored internally in the organization’s premises. Moreover, the act called as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the United States, it’s Data Protection directives along with the EU are only two regulatory compliance authorities from many other regulatory compliance concerns related to data and application of cloud computing. Moreover, the EU has backed up with a legislative data protection for the entire member across the globe. However, the US data protection differs from the EU, as it varies in each state. Moreover, the service provides incorporates the highest level of security in the clouds of their inbound technical intelligence, but these measures is affected due to government regulations country by country. For instance, if a cloud computing service providers is located within a country, the service provider is bound to slipshod provisions on privacy that may lead the involvement of the government enforcement agencies to peek in the hosted data of a particular organization. 5 Open Source Cloud Cloud computing continues to benefit business by lowering down the cost associated with hardware, software and human resource. However, some of the debatable issues including personal privacy, lack of security control and sharing data are still seeking a solution. Likewise, providing superior benefits for ease of development, minimized costs, high scalability along with next generation architecture are facilitating Information technology to evaluate cost benefit analysis while doing risk assessment. At the same time, open source has played a vital role in cloud computing and facilitated to enable low cost input that can also be considered as free of cost and rich features for cloud service providers. Moreover, buzz in the industry concludes that the cloud computing service will utilize the open source to gain power and control to establish next generation proprietary platform-as-a service that is similar to Web 2.0. Moreover, if Linux operating systems are used for cloud computing, there will be no licensing cost as compare to a Microsoft operating system environment. IBM clearly states in the economics of scale that one of the primary drivers for expanding the cloud is open source. Moreover, software or application is considered as a module in a computing environment, though and it is not a cost effective solution. However, open source software is not always successful, as they only become partially in some organizations. 5.1 Open Source Licensing Most of the open source applications are associated with the cloud and it is governed by various obligations included in the relevant open source license. Likewise complying with the software license is similar to any other compliance process, as an efficient compliance processes address issues and mitigate risks. Similarly, cloud computing services do not introduce any new risks but applications associated with these services introduce risks. However, applications that are operational in the cloud are distributed as compare to other software applications that are not shared. Likewise, there is less visibility and no evaluation or examination of the industry, therefore, cannot be categorized or fall under many obligations incorporating copy left licenses. 6 Conclusion The paper comprehensively discusses the introduction and current trends of cloud computing. It is evident that cloud computing provides vast variety of benefits and better Return on Investment (ROI) along with high availability. Cloud computing storage and associated risks with respect to information security were also discussed. Likewise, open source cloud concept is also discussed in detail. Moreover, total cost of ownership, management and configuration of computing devices is not required and most importantly, critical business applications can be accessed anywhere. Cloud computing has now been a slogan for cost effective online solutions, however, risks are also associated and must be addressed in transit of confidential information across the computer networks. 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