Assessment Of Technical Management And SLA Provisions For Cloud Vendor

Requirement of Remote Administration

The Department of Spatial Information (DSI) has considered your assessment of the deployment model, risk management and security issues for the Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS). They have decided that they need an additional assessment on the technical management and the SLA.

You have been assigned the task of providing DSI Executive Management with an assessment of the management requirements and the provisions of the SLA for the chosen cloud vendor. You are to:

1. Discuss the requirements for remote administration, resource management and SLA management. It may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjan’s operational checklists for DSI’s OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.

2. Discuss briefly how you will consider application resilience, backup and disaster recovery for your chosen provider in relation to OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.
 

The spatial information technology plays an important role in cloud server management. In case of an emergency or disaster such as earthquake, tornado etc. the spatial information theory can be applied to response immediately in managing the disaster. The resources of the cloud that are shared to its users needs to be allocated in such a way that the user can access these resources from any geographical location (da Cunha Rodrigues et al., 2015). The resources are managed efficiently using different management mechanism such as management system of SLA ,  remote administration system, payment management system and resource management system.

This report gives a view of spatial information in details to handle emergency conditions and sharing big data files across the users. The architecture of the cloud system is also shown in this report.

Remote administration system is used by the internal and external administrator to provide the interface and a set of tools for the management and administration of cloud based resources. A portal can be used by the remote administrator to manage the resources, bills and other SLA documents (AH et al., 2013). The application program interface and the tools used by the cloud administrator to monitor the status, performance and usage of the cloud service, managing the cost, tracking the access etc. In some cases the cloud consumers also want to work with remote administration. Sometimes the cloud consumer wants to work with remote administration service, this incurs an additional cost on the cloud service provider to develop an application program interface (Dinh et al., 2013).

Virtual private network (VPN) can be used by the remote administrator to manage the network resources. A strong backbone of dual band network is required for VPN, the first channel is dedicated for the administrator for sending and receiving administrative packets and the second channel is used to send and receive normal data packets from the user (Alfano et al., 2014). The headquarters can be connected to its branch offices remotely via the VPN efficiently and securely. Using VPN in remote administration has an advantage; a problem can be solved remotely by the cloud administrator through the dedicated channel of the administrator.

Remote Administration using VPN

Cloud plays an important role in resource management or ensuring the reliability of the cloud. Some strategy has been adopted by the cloud service provider for the management of the resources like pre copy  approach policy, just in time resource allocation, match making and scheduling and linear scheduling strategy (Erdil, 2013).

Pre copy approach: In this strategy the source memory is copied at a regular interval of time to the destination memory. This slows down the system and this causes a negative impact on the user as the fetching time of data increases and the user has to wait for the data (Rasmi & Vivek, 2013).

Just in time resource allocation: This technique is used to reduce the standby time of the machine. Different time intervals are set to the resources that changes according to the work load on the system. Load balancers used for this type o resource allocation techniques (Grozev & Buyya, 2016).

Matchmaking and scheduling: This technique a resource table is used from where a pool of data is fetched and assigns it to the different processes on the job.

Linear scheduling strategy: This is an algorithm that keeps track on the increase of selected quality of service parameters. The resources are distributed among the users and the QoS are increased (Manvi & Shyam, 2014).  

SLA is the blueprint of the cloud service provider, it stands for Service Level Agreement and act as a contract agreement between the customer and the cloud service provider. The SLA document has different terms and conditions that is required to be fulfilled by a company providing cloud service. The resources used in building the infrastructure and the details of the architecture are given in the SLA document to make the user know about the resources. A good SLA should have some criteria that it should meet. The details regarding data security, data recovery, location of data, data availability, and performance should be clearly given in the SLA (Moreno-Vozmediano et al., 2013). It is possible or a cloud server to go down but it is also possible to build a highly reliable cloud server using premium backup service. The SLA document should mention all the details to the customer and it depends on the customer that which service he would choose and security levels and action taken by the service provider in case of any failure and the time taken to recover should be mentioned in the service level agreement (Wu et al., 2012).

Cloud computing systems with the involvement of new technology like the spatial data infrastructure have an important role on the current economy. Using spatial data infrastructure virtualization technology can be adopted and thus eliminating the need of using centralized database. The resources used in distributed spatial information system should have good interconnectivity and should be able to communicate with each other. An emergency condition such as any disaster or any administrative failure can be managed using spatial data infrastructure by accessing and achieving the cloud service.

A huge storage space is provided by the cloud service provider for its user to store more data in the cloud servers and have accessibility to it from any geographical location. The cloud service provides a flexible plan for its users that is a user can increase its storage space if required on the click of a mouse. The data is stored in the cloud servers redundantly as backup, in case of any disaster the data is backed up from different servers to its original form. The data are first encrypted and then send to the storage locations (Thomas et al., 2013). In case of any failure the recovery time taken by the cloud servers is more than traditional backup systems since there is a limitation of the bandwidth that the user uses for cloud computing. If larger volume of data is to be restored from the cloud the server hosting the data sends it through some portable medium for faster and reliable transfer of data. Cloud serves have an advantage over traditional backup system that is the maintenance cost of cloud system is zero and more flexible option is provided by the cloud server (Nguyen eta l., 2013). To increase the storage capacity of a traditional backup system a new hardware is required to be added to the system but in case of cloud system extra storage can be added on extra cost.

Resource Management

There are many deployment models in cloud computing such as public model, private model and hybrid mode (Hsu et al., 2014). Analyzing all the models it can be said that the hybrid model of cloud computing is the best model suitable for an organization. The hybrid model is the combination of community and public cloud systems and uses software as a platform to have a connection between them (Beloglazov et al., 2012). This model has increased security as it uses strong firewalls applications within the cloud. This model is used for both public and private hosts and restricts the user to access unauthorized data and files. Large volumes of data can be managed efficiently using the hybrid model (Weiyan et al., 2014). 

Migrating to another cloud service platform can cause loss of a huge amount of data. Some of the risk can be identified such as internal system issue, migration error, connectivity error, usage of wrong methodology, insufficient system configuration and the most important security risk (Adhikari et al., 2012).

Some of the user files may get lost due to internal system errors like system error, storage error or processor error. If the system has a good health then also some risk may appear like migration of data from one system may cause data loss (Mamaghani, 2014). If the network connectivity is lost during the transmission of data then also the data may get lost. There may be many ways in which the data may get lost or damaged like due to lack of expertise of the worker and wrong technique used for file handling. The whole system may get corrupt if improper file handling is used or any wrong software is installed in the system (Azarnik et al., 2013). Sometimes the system used by the client may not have the configuration to support the cloud architecture, this causes a lag in the system during migration of large files and the files may be lost (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012).

The most dangerous risk is the security issue in cloud computing during migration of data. The cloud servers are prone to security threats; there may be risk of security during migration also (Younis & Kifayat, 2013). External agents may try to breach the security and access the important data of the organization (Gellman, 2012). They can also delete some important files or change some files that can lead to a massive loss for the organization (Ackermann et al., 2012). Some third party agents or rival company may also try to access the resources of the company to extract the internal information. Hackers can have access to the files and either deletes them or encrypts them and demands a lump sum of amount from the company to decrypt the files (Chen & Zhao, 2012).

There is other risk regarding the migration of data like the failure of the cloud servers, poor service and fraud cloud service provider but these are less important and can be resolved easily (Beloglazov & Buyya, 2013). 

SLA Management

Conclusion

There are many security threats which a cloud service provider is exposed to. There are also many weak points of cloud system and to overcome this various risks are identified and their management techniques are evolved. The cloud service provider are aware of their service and the have taken many precaution to avoid loss of data and increasing the security of the cloud storage system. By using different backup and recovery techniques the risk can be reduced to a certain level. By implementing the SLA document transparency between the cloud service provider and the client is maintained. Cloud service is cheap in comparison with traditional backup system and day by day its reliability is increasing as its flaws are getting reduced. The primary aim of this report is to analyze the utility and the management techniques used in cloud computing. To resolve the risk in cloud server’s spatial information system can be used to make it work more efficiently.  

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