Cloud Computing - Demerits and Benefits with Emphasis on Cost, Data Availability, and Data Security - Thesis Proposal Example

Introduction and Background Cloud computing is one of the most demanded and talked technologies in the contemporary world. The technology has got attention from both professionals and the media for it outstanding opportunities it offers to the market. According to a market analysis and research conducted by IDC, it states that cloud computing services rose from $ 20 billion in 2007 to $ 45 billion per year by 2012. It has also been estimated that the cost benefit of cloud computing has been more than 8 times out of ten for consumer applications and 7 times for business applications. According to a press release by Gartner in 2012, cloud computing will be more influential than e-business. Businesses have already made a move towards reducing operational and computing costs, through consolidation of their information technology operations and later to virtualization technological changes. For the good of businesses they have adopted a technology that will be of much help to them; cloud computing. Cloud computing takes a business to another level by allowing them reduce costs via improved utilization, reduction of infrastructure and administration cost as well as faster deployment cycles. Cloud computing is a term used to describe both application and platform. As a platform it reconfigures and configures servers, supplies as servers can be virtual or physical machines. On the other hand, cloud computing describes applications than can be extended to be accessed through the internet and by so doing powerful servers and large data centers are used to host we services and applications. A cloud is a word used to conceal the framework used as well as an abstraction of the internet. Cloud computing is different from traditional computing as it is able to be encapsulated like an abstract entity that offers different levels of services to the clients, it is scalable hence can be evaluated, its services are dynamically configurable and is driven by economies of scale. Purpose of study The purpose of this paper is to determine the demerits and benefits with emphasis on cost, data availability and data security; business can make use of cloud computing in the management and implementation of their respective information systems. Finally, a conclusion regarding factors in terms of data security and cost, business should know that adopting cloud computing is an effective and efficient use of information and data protection systems. Cloud Computing Architecture According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing architecture is defined via description of five important characteristics, four cloud deployment models, and three cloud services. Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing On demand self-service: under this, the consumer can un-provision or provision the services provided to the client void of any human interaction with the service provider. Broad Network Access: it can be accessed via standard mechanism and has capabilities over the network. Resource pooling: the resources of the provider are stationed in such a way that they can serve consumers with a multi-tenant model. It is composed of various virtual and physical resources dynamically allocated depending on the demands of the consumers. Measured Service: cloud computing services are usually optimized and controlled by a metering capability to the types of services such as processing, storage and bandwidth offered. Cloud Service Models Cloud computing has three service models. These three fundamental classification are known as SPI model; meaning software, platform and infrastructure services. Cloud Software as service: this is a provision whereby the consumer is allowed to use the provider’s applications that are running on the cloud. Cloud Platform as a Service: in this service, the consumer deploys created or acquired applications developed via programming languages on other tools offered by the provider on the cloud infrastructure. Cloud Infrastructure as Service: this is a facility offered to the consumer through which it can provide networks, processing and storage as well as other vital computing reserve whereby consumers can run and deploy software such as operating systems and other applications. Cloud Computing and Cost The most challenging part of businesses in the contemporary world is management if its economics and finances. Thus, the economic call of cloud computing is the conversion of capital expenses to operating expenses. Businesses that use clod computing have different payments with regards to the services offered by cloud computing providers. Cloud computing providers usually have sophisticated costing models used for billing their user costs and pay per use situation/basis. There are several cost models used in the world today, but the most used model is the short term billing model; this is one of the most novel and interesting feature of cloud computing. With respect to business applicability and sustainability scholars have identified and described cost benefits analysis of clod computing in two different aspects: provider perspective and consumer perspectives. The essence of using these different perspectives is that they offer different price and cost models. Cost in Consumer Perspective The paper will discuss consumer cost perspective with respect to the cost models that are adopted by every provider for the consumer to pay. In this perspective the pricing model will be shown from consumer perspective. Cloud computing offers a costing model that entails pay for use of computing facilities provided in short term basis as well as release the payments when not required. Thus this means that you let storage and machines go when not in use. For example, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offered by Amazon sells its 1.0-GHz x86 ISA slices at ten cents per hour and when adding new slices it adds up to 3 to 6 minutes. Amazon’s scalable Storage charges $0.25 to $0.35 per gigabyte per month and if additional bandwidth is needed then it charges $0.12 per gigabyte to move data from AWS over the internet. Hence, Cloud computing providers such as Amazon denote that multiplexing instances in a single physical box can be rented on several clients as long as they don’t interfere with each other. To business that have large volumes of data to protect and to share to its clients in a more fast way then they should opt for cloud computing services for efficiency and effectiveness. Read More