ITC561 Cloud Computing - Free Samples to Students

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:

 

Prepare a PowerPoint briefing for the MetaSoft board. Your briefing should:
Explain the main concepts of Cloud Computing and why you think that a move to the Cloud could be good for MetaSoft;
Explain some of the Cloud Architectures that you think would be useful for MetaSoft to use as part of their Cloud infrastructure.
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.
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:
Provide MetaSoft with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff;
Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach; 

Introduction

This detailed report aims to provide MetaSoft with two different approaches to providing office automation to their staff. A brief description of the dissimiliarities of infrastructure supplied by IaaS benefactor and PaaS provider is stated.  A detailed study of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS model variances in cloud computing is discussed in this report. A recommendation is provided to choose between the suggested models and the drawbacks of the recommended model that the company is likely to encounter is provided.

 A software Development Company, MetaSoft, does business with clients from New Zealand and Australia. The organisation is planning to shift to cloud computing for their computer infrastructure. Cloud computing allows MetaSoft to provide access to office automation for their staff. This includes email, word processing, spreadsheet capabilities, and online storage for the office files.

Approaches to provide office automation

Office automation is required in a company to provide the staffs with access to online storage of files, email, spreadsheet capabilities. This kind of automation is easily achieved by introducing Cloud computing in the organisation. The two diverse attitudes for providing office automation to the employees of MetaSoft are as follows:

1. Server automation:  the base infrastructure platform is same which tends to provide many users to access to the existing files and tools. The management cost and operations cost is higher in a diverse platform. The cost keeps on getting higher as the requirement of different skills sets and tools increases. Cloud helps to reduce these tasks, as there is a common storage place for all the tools. Any employee with access to the cloud of the company can access these files from office or from anywhere they wish. The major issue of this kind of automation is the workforce required to set up the servers and the connections (Raid 2015).
2. Application automation: in this approach, the end applications are same providing the ability to provide common applications to be developed across various platforms. Application change is controlled accurately and centrally where it is needed to service data centre and deploy applications. Operations teams has the ability to transform error-prone application service tasks into reliable application packaging. The major issues of this automation are the technical issues, external dependencies and the lack of infrastructure.

Differences between IaaS platform and PaaS platform 

IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. It delivers virtualized computing assets completed over the internet. Cloud provider clouds infrastructure components conventionally existing in data centre, which includes storage, servers and networking hardware. Example- Microsoft Azure

PaaS stands for Platform as a Service.  Software and hardware tools are delivered by a third party provider, which are required for application development. Hardware and software is hosted on the platform of the PaaS provider. This releases the effort of installing in-house software and hardware for developing or executing a new application. Example- Google app engine.

PaaS	IaaS
Main users are developers	Main users are systems managers
The services available are application and Service test, development, integration and deployment	Services available are virtual machines, network, operating systems, backup services and storage.
Business justification is to create and deploy service and applications for users	Creates platform for service and application test, development
Provides abstraction of underlying hardware, software and application services	Provides abstraction of underlying hardware resources
Flexibility and control is at a good degree	It has a minimal degree of control and flexibility
Operational cost is lower than IaaS	The cost  for operations is highest for IaaS
There is a lower portability	Best portability
Extra security is required to ensure that rogue applications cannot exploit vulnerabilities in software platform	Physical and virtual servers need to be secured

Differences between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS model

The variances between PaaS, IaaS and SaaS model are as follows:

1. IaaS model: works at the lower end of the managed cloud services spectrum. IaaS suppliers deploy and cope pre-configured and virtualised hardware diminishing the hectic server management and hardware investments. It provides scalability, which means there is no need of expanding server capacity and the unused capacity is allocated to any other server. Physical hardware is maintained by cloud provider, saving the time and cost. Another benefit of this model is that there is no need to pay for unnecessary resources. Pay for the resource, which are actually used. This model does not depend on the location of the server. Files and tools can be accessed from anywhere using the internet (Talia 2013).
2. PaaS model: typical features of this model are operating system, support, hosting, network access, server software, tools for development and design, server-side scripting environment, database management system.
3. SaaS model: this model provides a benefit of having no hardware costs because processing control is provided by cloud provider. Scalable usage is an advantage of this model. There is no installing cost, which means there is no such huge investment in the beginning. All the updates in this model are automatic.

Recommendation

It is recommended to choose server automation for providing automation to the staff of MetaSoft Ltd. As this automation provides a low cost of management and any employee can access the data in cloud from anywhere, as it does not depend on location. The recommended model for SharePoint service in MetaSoft Ltd. Is PaaS. As the IT industry is shifting towards a self-sufficient future of computing PaaS provides a key advantage, which is scalability. PaaS provides a greater scalability. User objects security is the major problem in this model and this problem can be overcome by providing better security to the database.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that the approach of MetaSoft Ltd. towards shifting to cloud computing is justified and necessary as there is a greater need of storing and protecting data as the company is thinking to spread its business. Cloud computing provides some advantages, which the heterogeneous systems are lacking to provide. Cloud computing architecture consists of three basic models, which are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Each has its own benfits and issues.  

References

Raid, J. (2015). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/630,523.

Talia, D. (2013). Clouds for scalable big data analytics. Computer, 46(5), 98-101.