COMP5349 Cloud Computing : Line of Business

Your task is to prepare a report for SoftArc Engineering that discusses the following:
1.Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist SoftArc Engineering meet the Board’s strategy?
a.Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it.
b.Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures.

2.Describe the risks that you see associated with this new Hybrid Cloud strategy. You should name and describe each risk that you identify, and then describe a possible control for the risk. This may be presented in a tabular form.

3.Describe the general Information Security steps and controls that you would recommend to the Board to secure the Hybrid Cloud. You will need to explain to the Board your reasons for recommending these particular security steps.

4.Discuss briefly what you would recommend should be included in SoftArc Engineering’s BCP as a result of their adoption of a Hybrid Cloud approach.

1. Introduction:

The SoftArc Engineering Ltd, a civil engineering firm, is arranging to use the cloud infrastructure for offering increased level of applicability and a better degree of flexibility for some of their Line of Business (LOS) operations. Moreover, the company board also incorporates the hybrid cloud methodology for achieving significant cost savings in the maintenance of their ICT infrastructure. So, this report intends on how the hybrid cloud strategy will affect their Business Continuity Plan and their disaster recovery and backup strategies.

2. Incorporation of Cloud Architecture in SoftArc Engineering:

For SoftArc Engineering organization that requires attaining higher flexibility can incorporate the hybrid cloud approach on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture.

2.1. Reasons for deploying IaaS cloud Architecture:

The IaaS cloud infrastructure services are ascetic models for acquiring, auditing, and administering the infrastructures of remote datacenter like virtualized, networking, storage, and networking services such as firewalls. The users can procure IaaS based on their utilization like electricity billing (Sotomayor, Keahey & Foster, 2006).

When compared to IaaS and PaaS architectures, IaaS consumers are authoritative for administering applications, runtime, and Operating Systems. The other services provided by IaaS include databases, virtualization layer services, and messaging queues. Examples for IaaS cloud architecture include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Joyent, and Cisco Metapod. According to the Cisco Research in 2013, the service revenues after utilizing IaaS are increased from $ 15.6 billion to $ 35.4 billion (Nurmi, 2008).

2.2. Benefits and Issues of deploying IaaS Cloud Architecture:

Benefits:

• IaaS is a cloud service where the firm employs a pay-as-you-consume infrastructure that leads to a cost effective strategy for both the service providers and users.
• It can defeat the business challenges by minimizing the burden of additional operational disbursements.
• It can be accelerated towards positive-value and earning promoting services while attaining advanced security and performance propensities.
• The customers can attain improved service.

Issues:

Achieving inflated scalability has certain diminutions. The IaaS architecture results in less robustness since the users have to substitute hardware with various software layers, thereby appending complexity and failures.

• The non-existence of isolation and robustness degrades the performance.
• The security provocations will incur due to the employment of large number of servers used for administration and the utilization of cloud for various development levels like evolution, establishment, and staging. For this context, separating and securing each domain is crucial because a failure in master service can give provisions to unauthorized access by means of secret pins to the entire framework (Foster, 1999).

3. Risks associated with Hybrid Cloud IaaS Strategy and Solutions:

Table 1: Cloud Architecture Deployment Risks and Solutions

4. Security Steps and Controls for securing Hybrid Cloud:

The security issues confronted during the incorporation of Hybrid cloud is not due to the hybrid cloud strategy but due to several aspects like improper organizational network execution, ineffective security protocols, and unskilled management (Sotomayor, 2009). The larger obstructions for hybrid cloud include incompetent compliance, inadequacy of proper encryption, lack of risk assessment techniques, deficiency in data redundancy, data loss, etc.

Certain security steps and controls are required to avoid the hybrid cloud security threats listed below:

• Deficiency in encryption
• Shortage of Risk Assessment Techniques
• Inadequate compliance
• Incompetent security administration
• Inappropriate Data Redundancy methods
• Imperfections in authentication and Identification
• Insecure Application Programming Interfaces
• Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS Hazards
• Unguarded IP
• Lack of Data management
• Downfall in interaction with cloud service providers
• Lack of well characterised SLAs
• Data Loss
• Infinite Management methods
• Improper implementation of cross-platform tools
• Malevolent Staff

The security controls for dealing with the above security threats are provide below:

• Security Solution for Deficiency in Encryption Techniques:
• Prevent transmissions from certain attacks by employing cryptographic protocols for authentication at endpoints.
• A devoted proxy server and virtual private network should be employed.
• All the data transmissions must be encrypted with Secure Software Layer (SSL) for establishing authentication and preventing loss of data.
• For conveying unencrypted network traffic, Security Shell network tunnel protocols should be exploited.

2) Security steps for insufficient assessment of security risks:

• Efficient risk assessment and prevention measures should be available at all times.
• The malevolent network traffic must be scanned by IDS or IPS security systems.
• The software updates are to be done regularly and log interpretation should be activated.
• The organization security can be further augmented by utilizing reliable holistic approach.

3) Security controls for Improper Compliance:

• The cloud users should ensure that two compliant clouds are working together.
• The clouds should meet information security organizational standards while handling sensitive information.

4) Solution for Inefficient Security Management:

• The data controls for the incorporated clouds should be reflected.
• On-premise storage management must be incorporated for the security of sensitive information that is not associated with public cloud.

5) Solution for Data Redundancy Issues:

• Multiple data centers must be utilized for single cloud service provider, multiple public cloud providers, and hybrid cloud.

6) Solution for Authentication and Identification failures:

• All the authorization permissions should be monitored and verified well.
• The data security is synchronized by means of IP Multimedia core Network Subsystem.

5. Application Resilience and Disaster Recovery Strategy for SoftArc Engineering BCP:

• According to the vice president of cloud services at VMware ‘Mathew Lodge’, the hybrid cloud proffers certain advantages for BCP and disaster recovery. It can leads to the inexpensive disaster recovery while improving the agility and flexibility of disaster recovery on storage drives and office applications like Email, Word, or Spreadsheet.
• So planning for the recovery of disasters in web-based operating systems like RedHat Linux allows the user to note down the failures instantly. Hence, the users have to deploy a business strategy that will match the application’s downtime tolerance.
• The cloud platforms for e.g. Microsoft Azure offers geographically divided networks around the globe. These cloud platforms offer abilities that gives support to high availability and various disaster recovery cases (Sotomayor, 2009). Microsoft Azure contains application resiliency and disaster recovery features utilized in many of its cloud services. Hence, by using cloud platforms like Azure, the larger business continuity plan can be implemented in SoftArc organization.
• The interdependent characteristics like extreme availability, fault tolerance, and scalability contribute to the overall BCP solution. The specified cloud owner must administer the entire disaster recovery, testing, and automation. The implementation of cloud platform like Azure can offer new capacities and additional challenges for crafting robust hybrid cloud applications that can handle failures in office and web-based solutions.

6. Mechanisms for performing Remote Server Administration, Resource, and SLA Management:

The remote administration system, resource management system, and SLA management system offer integrated application programming interfaces and are offered individually as custom software applications or merged into several product suites.

The remote administration mechanism offers configuration management tools for managing cloud-based IT resources.

The remote administration mechanism can generate a portal for accessing management features of several systems including resource administration, billing management, and SLA management systems (Rochwerger, 2008).

6.1. Remote Management of VM/Instances in Google Cloud

1. The Create Project button in Google Developer console is clicked to create a group of instances.
2. Then click Compute Engine and click for creating and running virtual machines on Google infrastructure.

3. Click Instance Groupsoption under Compute Enginefor managing the group of virtual machine instances.

6.2. Managing office 365 and billing documents:

By using office 365, files are secured and backed up in the cloud environment. It can be accessed from any device at any time.

The tasks that can be performed by the cloud users through remote administration system are QOS monitoring, SLA fulfilment, cost management, managing security credentials, authorization management, access control management, capacity planning, etc.

7. Steps for migrating to AWS:

Step 1: Virtual network for multi-tiered SharePoint server and active directory framework should be launched in AWS.

Step 2: The database tier must be launched. An AWS cloud enabled SQL server 2010 Amazon Machine Image is created to authorize configuration of SQL server components of Sharepoint Server farm.

Step 3: Then the application server tier is launched. This involves installing Sharepoint servers using Sharepoint windows PowerShell scripts.

Step 4: After that web Front-end tier is set up. This involves the installation of web Front-end servers for enabling work load balanced acquisition to Sharepoint web application by utilizing Sharepoint Amazon Machine Image created in the above step (Sotomayor,2008). The Amazon elastic load balancer is deployed in front of Web Front End Servers.

Step 5: This includes the configuration of SharePoint farm servers. The application server instances are configured by employing the Sharepoint technologies and Products configuration wizard.

8. AWS migration Issues:
9. The IT security compliance issues are encountered. The AWS Relational Database Management System is not HIPPA compliant with SQL server 2010 (Snell, 2010).
10. The shared storage required for Microsoft SQL server is not supported in AWS. The third-party solution like SIOS is recommended by Microsoft Azure and AWS.
11. “Always On availability groups” are not supported in Microsoft SQL server standard edition.
12. Elastic Beanstalk modifies the instances while provisioning, which leads to issues in the AMI.
13. More time will be consumed for configuring the Sharepoint farm servers through AWS marketplace.
14. Conclusion:

The migration from a conventional or traditional data center based technology environment to cloud-based environment has several added advantages. In many cases, the better performance can be achieved by the transition from data center, to private IaaS infrastructure, followed by the migration to Hybrid IaaS cloud environment.

References:

Foster, I. (1999). A Distributed Resource Management Architecture that Supports Advance Reservations and Co-Allocation. Proc. Int'l Workshop on Quality of Service, 3(2), 27-36.

Nurmi, D. (2008, January 8). The Eucalyptus Open-Source Cloud-Computing System. Retrieved from www.cca08.org/papers.php.

Rochwerger, B. (2008). The Reservoir Model and Architecture for Open Federated Cloud Computing. IBM Systems J, 4(3), 160-178.

Sotomayor, B., Keahey, K. & Foster, I. (2006). Overhead Matters: A Model for Virtual Resource Management, Proc. 1st Int'l Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (VTDC 06), 5, 2006.

Sotomayor, B. (2008, February 9). Capacity Leasing in Cloud Systems using the OpenNebula Engine. Retrieved from www. cca08.org/papers.php.

Sotomayor, B. (2009). Resource Leasing and the Art of Suspending Virtual Machines. Proc. 11th IEEE Int'l Conf. High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 09), 12(4), 59-68.

Snell, Q. (2000). The Performance Impact of Advance Reservation Meta-Scheduling. Proc. Workshop Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing (IPDPS 00/ JSSPP 00), 137-153.