Data Communication and Cloud Computing - Essay Example

Lecturer: Topic: Data communication is a term used to refer to the exchange of data between two devices that happens via some form of transmission medium, could be a wire cable or internet medium, which are part of a system of the communicating devices made up of a combination of hardware – physical equipment – and software – programs installed on these devices that enable the effectiveness of data communication systems which depend on the characteristics such as delivery, accuracy, timeliness and jitter,1. Delivery system must deliver data to the correct destination and data must be received by the intended device or user and only by that device or user and the accuracy aspect determines the delivery of the data in such a way that it was not altered in transmission and left uncorrected or unusable, he timeliness of the communication system must be such that there is no lateness that will render the information useless and a preferred delivery should be real time transmission and jitter refers to the variation in the packet arrival time and is the uneven delay in the delivery of audio or video packets. The components of data communication include the message i.e. the information or data to be communicated and popular forms include text, numbers, pictures, audio and video. The sender is an important component as it is the device that sends the data message as it can be computer work station, telephone handset or a video camera as the receiver is the device on the other end receiving the information as the transmission medium is the physical path by which a message travels from the sender to receiver e.g. twisted pair wire, coaxial cable, fiber optic cable and radio waves. Data communication and other aspects such as networking are changing the way business is done and the lifestyle of people in the world today. Business decisions have to be made even more quickly and the decision makers required access to accurate information relevant to the subject at hand. Computer data communication models in the world today enable the transfer of information through long distances and the information appears almost instantaneous through computer networks2. Businesses today rely on computer networks and internet works in relaying the information across varied distances in modes that enable the efficient communication of data and the development of personal computers brought about tremendous changes for business, industry, science and education as a similar revolution is occurring in data communication and networking. Technological advances are making it possible for communication links to carry more and faster signals and as a result services are evolving to allow the use of this expanded capacity. An example is the establishment of the telephone services such as conference calls, call waiting, voice mail and caller ID has been extended as research in data communication and networking too resulted in new technologies. Data communication in the form of text, audio and video from all points of the world has been made possible due to the access of internet to download and upload information quickly and accurately at any time. As the information is being sent and received, there is need for the security of the message as to avoid distortion and third party interference. On the other hand the storage and speed has led to the invention and introduction of a cloud computing concept. Cloud computing is a new key discipline of high performance computing sophisticated information technologies in order to treat some of the major high performance computing challenges enabling trusted technical computing solutions for the 21st century customers. It is a technology that allows consumers and businesses – generally the users - to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access and also allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth as well as provide information technology resources in a dynamic and scalable manner over a network easily accessible at any point of the established infrastructure. The essential characteristics of the cloud are on demanding self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured services as the applications of cloud computing are huge and impact nearly all sectors e.g. some automotive firms are convinced that the future lies in cloud computing, in some recent vehicles, the software used in the vehicle online application systems is not stored in the vehicle but runs off the firm backend. The advantage of such as system is that the applications can be continually updated in the cloud and new applications released to the automotive firm’s customers without the need of visiting a workshop. These tremendous civil applications are not derived from the military applications such as the internet or GPS. Cloud computing is only beginning to be used in the military intelligence fusion as the advantages are already applied in rapid access computing environment used the department of defense and the U.Ss military owned private computing to Afghanistan. Nevertheless cloud computing has not been effectively exploited in military embedded application because of the performance and correctness constraints but some of these strategic embedded military applications include the critical command and control systems, in-field data and information analysis, image data processing onboard missiles as well as other intelligence areas. The main challenges of cloud computing are the need for wide bandwidth, concerning security, concern for malfunctions of the cloud, legal and political issues and concern for the rights of the users which pose a challenge to the increasing number of the Cloud users in effecting their business ideologies. According to Magoules, Pan & Teng (3)3, the deployment models of cloud can take different fashions depending on the usage scopes but generally there are four different deployment models. Public cloud is the standard computing paradigm in which a service provider makes resources such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the internet and service providers charge at a fine-grained utility computing basis e.g. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Widows Azure Services Platform as on the other hand private cloud looks more like a marketing concept than the traditional mainstream sense in the sense that it describes a proprietary computing architecture that provides services to a limited number of people on internal networks. Organizations that need accurate control over their data will prefer a private cloud so they can get all the scalability, metering and agility benefits of a public cloud without ceding control, security and recurring costs to a service provider as such a cloud with the necessary private characteristics as well as security can be provided by both eBay and HP Cloud Start deployments. A hybrid cloud uses the combination of both a public and private cloud and even local infrastructures which is typical for most information technology enterprises. Hybrid strategy is proper placement of workloads depending upon the cost and operational compliance factors as vendor including HP, IBM, Oracle and VMware create appropriate plans to leverage a mixed environment with the aim of delivering services to the business and they can deploy an application hosted on a hybrid infrastructure in which some of the nodes are running on real physical hardware and others on cloud server instances4. Community clouds overlap to grids to some extent as it refers to several organizations in a private community sharing the cloud infrastructure. The organizations usually have similar concerns about mission, security requirements, policy and compliance considerations as the community cloud can be further aggregated by a public cloud to build up a cross boundary structure5. According to Ross and Blumenstein (1)6, Cloud computing has been an innovative disruptive technology that is changing how information and communication technologies are accessed and uses as its perceived benefits include lower costs, scalability, portability and reduces software and hardware obsolesce. It has been linked to entrepreneurship and innovation with its pay on demand model that makes it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone anywhere to be an entrepreneur and to have access to the best infrastructure of innovation as commentators suggest that these changes will lead to innovative business models as organizations increasingly leverage the opportunities provided by the cloud, Baker (pp 4)7. Cloud computing has provided avenues for organizations to optimize the potential of their employees in terms of training services as an emerging technological innovation. It is flexible and cost effective in a manner that has referred learning as a service to bring out a more extensive cultural change in the organization by integrating training methods using a variety forms of education including internal learning through cloud technology and peer training 8. References Baker, Stephen. ‘‘Google and the Wisdom of Clouds: a lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of many’’, Bloomberg Business Week, available at: www.businessweek. com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm Forouzan, Behrouz and Sophia Fegan. Data Communications and Networking. Burr Ridge: McGraw-Hill Science, Engineering & Mathematics, 2006. Magoule?s, F, Jie Pan, and Fei Teng. Cloud Computing: Data-intensive Computing and Scheduling. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2013. Mirchandani, Vinnie. The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley, 2010. Print. Ratten, V., (2012). Implementing Cloud Learning In An organization: A Training Perspective. Journal of industrial and commercial training. 44(6), pp.334 - 336 Ross, P & Blumenstein, M. (2012). Cloud Computing: The Nexus of Strategy and Technology. Journal of Business Strategy. 34(4), pp.39 - 47 Read More