Approaches To Office Automation And Choosing The Right Cloud Service Model For Regional Gardens Ltd.

Approaches to Office Automation

Question:

Discuss about the Computational Intelligence and Networks.

There are various gardening enterprise related to the company of Regional Gardens Ltd. It sells the plants and garden supplies to public. The Regional Gardens Ltd data center is located in Bathurst with the infrastructure of the server. The workflow tool of cloud provides flexibility to their design. The existing process has been changed into the cloud-based infrastructure. The employees were able to get access control with limited entry into the office premises. The integral part of the automation system understands the requirement. Employees and public can access cloud-based workflow from anywhere. This study will provide the information about the approaches made to Office automation with its benefits and issues. It will also recommend with the best feature that can be used as a Service provider by understanding the basic difference between the PaaS and IaaS model. The benefits that the model provide and the issue arises with the use of such model. The study will also give the reason for selecting the appropriate model and provide with solution to the issue if arise any during the implementation of such model.

The Regional Garden provide access to office automation namely spreadsheet, word processing, email, online file storage at home, in the office, or deployed in the field on the customer’s site (Alam, Pandey & Rautaray, 2015). Two of the different approaches of Office automation that can be provided to the staff are:

To know the results yield by the office automation, the ultimate decision-maker is the data that is important for the company to compare the outcome of the quality, process history and the cost made for selling the plant and supplies of garden to the public. It would be time-consuming if the company adopts any other software to measure the data of workflow unnecessarily. As it involves multiple teams if the process has other software dependencies (Demirkan et al., 2015). Thus, a single piece of software has embedded with the feature of Report and analytic would be a better approach for them.

It is not possible for the manager to always be around the employees checking through their work. There is a simple solution to this in today’s evolving technology. The employees have to just pick a workflow of the automation system that is cloud-based (Gai et al., 2016). This will enable the employee to access the office automation from anywhere. Thus, this feature comes with the feature of great mobile compatibility that has a Cloud-based workflow.

Benefits of Office Automation

Office automation provides efficiency to the workflow (Deelman et al., 2015). The benefits of automation in the office workflows are:

• Cutting down the manual error and intervention of the human
• Completing a mundane tasks and reduces the effort that was made manually
• Some of the invaluable resources and time has save
• Identifying and gaining process visibility
• Based on the change and process demand, the business decisions have made
• The metrics performance process are known

Regional Garden has to decide whether to use IaaS model or PaaS model that provides cloud services as their infrastructure deployment to their employee. The difference has discussed below, as they initially wanted to move their Web infrastructure to public Cloud. These differences will let them identify which platform would be better for them.

PaaS refers to “Platform-as-a- Service”. PaaS provides a platform where the software has to developed and deployed. A PaaS provider mostly deals with servers that take care of the environment of the operating system, server software, server hardware and the infrastructure of the network (Puthal et al., 2015). The providers of PaaS include Red Hat’s, Google App Engine, Heroku and OpenShift.

IaaS stands for “Infrastructure-as-a-Service”. An IaaS provider provides scalable compute resources and the highly automated cloud storage through API and dashboard (Botta e al., 2016). It is the most flexible model for the storage, servers, networking and processing power automated deployment. The clients that use IaaS infrastructure have better control than the PaaS and SaaS services. IaaS is mainly use for web-scale applications and actual deployment and development of SaaS and PaaS.

• Availability will be high
• Is scalable
• Without any proper maintenance of the software, developers will have the ability to create an app with customization
• Coding get reduces
• Policy of the business get automate
• Easily migrate to hybrid model

The benefit that has to achieve by the use of IaaS are (Iosup, Prodan & Epema, 2014):

• It is the most flexible model of cloud computing
• Highly scalable
• The deployment of network servers, processing powers and storage get automated easily.
• Purchasing of hardware through better consumption
• Clients have complete control over their infrastructure
• As per the requirement resources has to be purchased

It is recommended to the Regional Garden to migrate their Web infrastructure and choose IaaS service provider. The reason to choose IaaS is that it has the capability to purchase resources for the business that are on-demand and when needed rather than buying a hardware outright. Through Virtualization Technology IaaS would be able to deliver infrastructure of Cloud Computing in which storage, network, servers and operating systems are included (Manvi & Shyam, 2014). They would have complete control over the entire infrastructure, as it would provide virtual data center that can access the storage and server directly.

The major issue of IaaS is that employees can have direct access to hardware and the networks (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). They can even have access to systems provision, hypervisors and infrastructure that need authentication. Due to the amount of data being large, it become easier for attackers to target the platform that have IaaS provider. This risk can be reduce by minimizing the drivers of virtualization and the supported features of hypervisor and tools of intrusion detection. It already have an advance security features. It require regular software updates, vulnerabilities analysis, regular testing, monitoring and auditing.

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