Cloud Computing For MetaSoft: Advantages, Disadvantages, And Factors To Consider In An Essay.

Advantages of Cloud Computing for MetaSoft

1.MetaSoft Ltd is a software development company which works for clients across Australia and New Zealand. The company is considering moving some of its computer infrastructure into the Cloud. The MetaSoft Board is contemplating this move as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness, as well as to achieve some savings on the cost of maintaining their ICT infrastructure.

MetaSoft has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud Computing in their daily operations. They have some 100 software engineering and support staff that work on different projects for clients in Australia and New Zealand. They have been advised that a move to using a Cloud based infrastructure would be an advantage to them.
Your task is to:

A.Prepare a PowerPoint briefing for the MetaSoft board. Your briefing should:

a.Explain the main concepts of Cloud Computing and why you think that a move to the Cloud could be good for MetaSoft;

b.Explain some of the Cloud Architectures that you think would be useful for MetaSoft to use as part of their Cloud infrastructure.

c.Each slide in the briefing must also include speaking notes in the notes section to explain the slide, and all images used in the briefing should be referenced. 

2.One of MetaSoft’s first undertakings is to provide all their staff with the ability to access office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files, whether they are in the office, at home, or deployed on site in the field. The MetaSoft board is very concerned to learn about the critical issues, other than cost, that may affect the supply of Cloud based office automation to their staff. You will need to prepare a report on the best way to provide office automation for MetaSoft. Your report should:

a.Provide MetaSoft with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff;

b.Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach;

c.Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose. Your report should be no longer than 2 pages. (20 marks)

3.MetaSoft has data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian data centres are linked by a fibre based WAN, which is supplied and maintained by a local Telco, and data is replicated between the data centres daily. The two data centres each run x86 based servers attached to a HPE 3PAR SAN with 1PB of storage. They also have a series of RHEL 6 servers (Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.0) that are used to host Web pages and various Web services. The RHEL 6 servers are located only in the Sydney data centre. MetaSoft is considering initially moving its Web infrastructure to a public Cloud, but they are unsure of whether they should migrate to an IaaS or PaaS solution. You are to write a report for the MetaSoft board that:

a.Describes the difference between infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider and a platform provided by a PaaS provider in a public Cloud. You will need to discuss the critical differences, issues and factors, other than cost, that MetaSoft will have to consider in choosing to migrate their Web infrastructure to either an IaaS or a PaaS service provider. Your report should take no more than two pages. (30 marks)

4.MetaSoft is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. MetaSoft has deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2013 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its 100 employees. The SharePoint 2013 instance has been extensively customised to suit MetaSoft’s needs and also runs Project Central, their Project Management tool as a separate application from within SharePoint. All employees have the Microsoft Office 2013 suite of office automation products installed on their respective desktops or laptops. MetaSoft would like to move its SharePoint 2013 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users in remote or overseas locations. MetaSoft want you to report on:

a.What are the major differences between the models IaaS, PaaS and SaaS? 

b.Recommend the model that you consider most appropriate for this service and discuss why this model is the most appropriate for the SharePoint service. 

c.What are the most likely problems that MetaSoft will encounter with the model that you recommend? How would you advise MetaSoft to deal with these issues? 

Cloud computing s a service used by most of the organizations. These services provide Information Technology services where the resources are from internet with the help of some applications that run with internet connection. Using cloud-computing services the organizations do not need to save their data in a storage device or a hard drive, they can just save them in a cloud-based storage (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). This way, the data is saved in a remotely database. In order to access the data, the device needs to have access to the internet.

MetaSoft is a software development organization that has been providing services to the clients in New Zealand and Australia. The organization has decided to move some of its computer infrastructure in cloud. This would increase their flexibility as well as responsiveness. It would also help them to save some cost incurred in maintaining the infrastructure of ICT. I have been elected as a consultant for advising them on the usage of cloud computing in their daily operations. This report discusses regarding some importance as well as issues found n cloud computing.

Office Automation 

1. The two different approaches by which MetaSoft can provide office automation to their staffs are Adhoc approach and structured approach. Both the approaches can help the organization in many ways. Adhoc approach is an informal procedure, which might cause the system to break (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). Structured approach is the approach by which the activities under automation o f the organization is categorized and then performed.
2. The major benefits with both the approaches are as follows

• Adhoc approach is very less time consuming because it does not need much planning, test case design and documentation.
• It checks weather the automation is complete or not and finds issues in the activities.
• Structured approach maps out as well as carries out the activities in a structured manner.
• Structure approach also provides feedback, which would help the professionals to map out the errors and rectify them before the automation, is completed.

The issues with both the approaches are as follows

• Adhoc testing does not require documentation or planning of the process that has been followed (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). This testing finds issues with the activities without the use of documentation; the faults cannot be mapped to test the cases. As a result, sometimes it might be very tough to reproduce the faults.
• Structured approach may be very time consuming because it may result in long delays in finding out the errors.

3. The organization should choose the structured approach because though it is time taking but it works in a systematical manner unlike the Adhoc approach.

Differences between infrastructures provided by both are as follows

• PaaS provides a comprehensive service to the applications that are cost effective. Compared to IaaS, PaaS delvers complete result for creation, design, deployment and testing of the applications used by client(Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). After that, they combine with the members of the team, version control and many more.
• IaaS compared to PaaS offers tools for networking, operations, and hardware and data storage by using internet. As a result, the subscriber does not need to worry about the purchase cost and geographical location.

Differences and issues with the models are as follows

• PaaS lets several applications to use the cloud services when being used. It offers a specific framework to the developers and allows them to build customized applications. PaaS do not deliver software on the net; it offers a platform for creating software. It provides some unique software components that help in creating the applications, unlike any other models.
• IaaS is manufactured of automated and scalable compute resources. It is a self- service for monitoring as well as  accessing various activities like computing, storage, networking, and many more. It also allows the organization to buy required resources whenever they need it.

Issues

• PaaS can be trusted regarding the security of data but it makes the system perform very slowly. This happens because before the data is sent to providers of PaaS, it is encrypted.
• PaaS allows organizations to build, manage and run applications without any use of infrastructure, which is actually needed.
• The main risk of IaaS is the commandeering of various services. This happens without any warning.
• IaaS offers computing resources which are virtualized in internet and which is hosted by some third party.

Factors that MetaSoft should consider before migrating to cloud are as follows

• Security
• Data location
• Scalability
• Reliability

1. Differences between the models are as follows

• IaaS offers the automatic deployment of things like storage, compute, networking services and networking. By using IaaS, users can create a virtual center for storing data (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). Users would be allowed to use the servers of other people and access to virtual machines. They not need to use only their servers for doing so. Users can use the services of IaaS and pay the bill according to the amount of service used by them. Some providers of IaaS services are Amazon we services, Google cloud, Microsoft Azure, Exoscale and many more.
• SaaS is one of the most common models of cloud computing services. It has the highest level of abstraction. It allows the user to connect to the web and use cloud based applications for their purpose (Kavis, 2014). In this model, the tasks such as management and deployment of software are provided to the services that are third party. With the usage of SaaS, the cloud-based applications can be used directly by just getting access to internet. They do not need any downloading or installing (Kavis, 2014). Some applications that follow the principles of SaaS are Google Apps, office 365, Drop box, Sales force and many more.
• PaaS offers a low level of abstract unlike SaaS. It provides a platform where software is created as well as launched (Kavis, 2014). It also provides the developers a portal that is self-service and is used for provisioning the infrastructure of the computer.

2. SaaS model of cloud computing is appropriate for SharePoint service because this is the model where VM and hypervisor are obtained from the users and all of it is exposed in the resulted application, SharePoint (Kavis, 2014). Office365 is best example for this. Here the provider is trusted for running the application in permanent as well as available manner. SaaS contains Rack space; the users run their payloads of SharePoint in a cloud, which is private in nature.
3. Issues in SaaS model and some recommendations to solve them.

• Users of Saas should have a permanent internet connection in order to get access to the data saved in the cloud. In this case, the employees would not be able to work offline. This is an identified risk in SaaS and it can be solved by the use of Software plus Service.
• Data control: most of the organizations are not informed regarding the procedure used by the service providers to secure their data or the backup plans that they have in order to retrieve the data when lost (Kavis, 2014). As a result, managers should  research regarding the service provider before receiving services from them. this is described in details in Service Level Agreement contract.
• Data location is also a risk in SaaS. This means to know where the data is located. The Federal Information Security Management states that the data should remain within the country (Kavis, 2014). The laws can be asked regarding the location of their data.

Conclusion

From the above report, it can be concluded that cloud, computing has various advantages that can be highly beneficial for the MetaSoft. Along with various advantages, there are several disadvantages as well. These disadvantages should be considered before migrating to cloud computing. The various issues regarding cloud computing and its models are mentioned in details in the report.

References

Ali, M., Khan, S. U., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2015). Security in cloud computing: Opportunities and challenges. Information sciences, 305, 357-383.

Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.

Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). John Wiley & Sons.

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press