The Disappearing Data Center - Case Study Example

The Disappearing Data Center Introduction The case scenario at hand is of company Triple Z, which is a furniture maker and seller located in Maryland. The main challenges in the organization are slow transmission to and from its smaller subsidiaries. There is also a challenge in handling large data files of invoices and receipts from clients. Orders processing speed is not as expected and lead to frequent complaints from the clients. The upper side is that implementing a new strategy to solve the issues will hand more opportunities to the company from her satisfied clients. What Are The Energy Considerations Companies Have To Consider When Deciding Where To Host Their Systems? Availability of alternative sources of energy is the initial consideration to ensure that there will be no downtime for the hosted system. Along with the energy consideration, the environment in which the source lies must not pose to the stability of the energy supplied to the host platform. Nearness from the source to the premises must also be highly considered to ensure that no extra cost is incurred while targeting particular source of energy (Floracks 101). What Has Been The Role Of Virtualization On Data Centers And What Are The Long Term Implications? Virtualization of datacenters has been on the rise for various companies for the last few years probably because of the long-term beneficial implications. The cloud could be termed as software powered by superior hardware, pools of virtualized hardware running on software that enables to decommission resources and offer them the ability to provision within a short period. It offers great flexibility and more leverage to businesses, in this model for instance, the provider owns the entire assets, physical infrastructure, and allows companies to buy access to the resources for billing on bandwidth, storage or access time. Virtualization on a private cloud is a considerable option where an individual entity hosts the entire resources on a virtualized platform for exclusive utilization by the subject company. Among the beneficial implications include manageable resources, reduced overheads and eases on security management, compliance, and privacy. Other related risks are also easier to manage such as those emanating from shared resources and multi-tenant base but require significant ongoing and up-front investment by the firm’s private cloud consumer. Virtualized platforms allow users to provision quickly on new virtual machines above the existing pool of resources. Virtualization promises elasticity of computing and security of dedicated the involved servers and provides the ability to extensively optimize the utilization of computing resources, also applies to the single applications (Floracks 101). What Are the Issues Surrounding Moving Your Company’s Data Center to the Cloud and How Would You Address Them? A combination of economic realities and technological advancements of the current times has given more power to the rise of the cloud computing era. Similar to the historical client-server and the historical mainframe, advent of cloud computing is a fundamental change in the way people consume computing resources as the main challenge in our company. I would solve the challenge by implementing cloud technology that will allow sharing of resources, information and resources across a rapidly expanding collection of interconnected devices delivering new opportunities for our company’s efficiency and speed. The company will require the fundamental overall cost structure for information technology logistics to change. Recent studies indicate that 70% of the budget is spent on maintaining IT systems while only 30% is available to enhance productivity enhancing innovations. The company’s CEOs, CFOs, IT executives and CIOs will have to demand computing solutions providing cutting-edge performances, enhanced availability, massive and rapid scalability and bulletproof reliability, all within cost-efficient envelopes that will keep the enterprises lean and fast. On identifying the applications as viable for the cloud, the company’s next move will be to make a consideration of the platform the cloud will engage. Although the cloud may seem like the ultimate flexibility platform, wise decision-making must also be observed to avoid restricting the intended agility. From this, the company will have to evaluate the propriety offered by closed platforms (Floracks 77). Qualities to Deliberate on Concerning a Platform Provider • What kind of consumer services and response time is guaranteed? • The flexibility of the service level agreement (SLA)? • Is the platform open-source based or proprietary, closed one? • Does the provider bill a fixed or variable package for capacity? • Are there technical specifications supported? • Does the provider offer both cloud computing and dedicated hosting solutions under one roof? Although the words in the proposal letter may be enticing through assurance and appearance of upfront flexibility, a company may find itself locked into systems that reduce computing options rather that expanding. Therefore, it is crucial that each enterprise recognizes that not the entire cloud computing offers are valid to reach a platform that allows for flexibility both in the short and long term (Floracks, 56). What will the IT Architecture of a Data Center in Five Years Will Be Composed Of? On the implementation of cloud technology or on virtualization, there are a number of follow-up attachments that are incorporated as the concepts gains stability. For instance at the present, the company faces a collection of obstacles such as complex systems, large capital expenditure, and overburdened human resources. These create challenges in deploying newer application and assets quickly and effective maintenance cost. The data center will be more flexible and running on agile IT. Within the next five years, the architecture will have solved challenges such as overburdened resources, high dealing cost, and slowness that the company is experiencing at the moment. Hurdles such as latency, security and legacy will be a matter of the past. The architecture will be composed of a stronger IT management policy (Floracks, 22). What Are The Critical Data Center Issues CIOs Should Be Making the CEOs and Boards Aware Of Today? CIOs run the main cogs in the business running on computers. They are supplied with the responsibility of frequently reporting to the CEOs and the board of the company concerning the developing matter and especially around the virtualized system as the present. Nearly most of both of the recipients of the reporting worry on matters of security associated with the cloud and consolidation virtualization. The CIOs must communicate on the measures being implemented to avoid advanced target attacks and advanced persistent attacks besides the zero-day attacks. The CIO should recommend that the company steps up on the implementation of entry traps mean to hold the malware at bay from network infiltration and segmentation strategies for preventing malicious applications from roaming the data center. Malware checks must also be a point of concern while communicating address matters such as denial of service or unauthorized access both locally and external to the cloud users. Priorities must also be accorded on antivirus, firewall, and encryptions for the resting and the data in motion (Floracks 31). From the research and observations above the recommendations were implemented ant Triple Z and the transfer to the cloud platform implemented. A team from the IT department was chosen to design the management policies and internal controls to govern the system. Work Cited Floracks, Thomas. Clouding Hosting - Amazon Web Services. Colombia: Asociacion Colombiana De Ingenieros De Sistemas, 2010. Print. Read More