Risks Associated With The New Hybrid Cloud Technology – Soft Arc Strategies Analysis And Recommendations

Cloud Architecture to be employed by the organization:

Soft Arc is really bothered with the selection of the right strategy for cloud computing requirements and in this connection there are number of considerations made by the company in making a right choice. The company has actually decided to close its Brisbane data centre and planned to migrate its data centres to other parts of the operational centres (Sydney). The current web services are also decided to get switched over to the cloud. The following part of the discussion will provide a very detailed and comprehensive analysis of the strategies considered by the company and the recommendations are provided in the report. 

There are three options in total for the company to select cloud architecture for its current strategy. Either it can go for public cloud or a private cloud or alternatively it can go for hybrid cloud architecture as well. All these three cloud architectures are expected to provide the necessary strategic support for the organization to perform its operations in the networked conditions. The public cloud for the organization is not very secured and cannot be selected for making transactions that involves secured and highly private transaction. Being a civil engineering company involving with day to day communication and data exchange of critical project information it is not possible to take up insecure network strategies. The private cloud architecture can be considered but it is not very economic. Considering the cost of the architecture it may not be advisable for the company to take up high cost private architectures for all its operations. There are considerable lot of routine information exchange and data communication which may not require high expensive private cloud for the organization. Hence hybrid architecture is proposed for the organization which involves both the private as well as public cloud architectures and will be of use in keeping things secured and cost effective as a whole. Still for the private cloud architecture there are two options, the first option is that the private architecture can either be operated from on premises in the organization or alternatively it can be operated from third party control as well. In any case the operations of the organizations will be secured with hybrid architecture and the control on the operations in private cloud can still be retained by the organization (Mell&Grance, 2011).

The three different cloud architectures:

Public cloud will work on to enable the functioning of the applications and the storage on the cloud which will be in the third party control and the operation and access of the same is not restricted to Soft Arc alone.

Private cloud can be operated strictly with control in the hands of the organization. The facilities and features of the private cloud will be controlled by the third party, however data centres can be in the premise or alternatively they can be in the cloud.

Hybrid cloud as the name indicated will integrate both the public as well as private cloud characteristics and the features of safety and security are available for the hybrid cloud. Also there is good economy in hybrid architecture when compared with the exclusive public cloud (Gong et al., 2010).

Benefits and Issues:

Public cloud can result in data breach and loss of data integrity. Not very secured. Private cloud can have high security and safety as part of the operations. Hybrid cloud can have both the features of the public and the private cloud architectures. Hybrid structure is safe and economy. However the issues of integration and problems of SLA and resource management requires high expertise. Frequent maintenance may requires using high tech personnel and requires to be well managed.

• Operational complexity and the associated risks. The risk of data security loss on private cloud.
• Loss of security compliance from the public to the private cloud is a feature to be taken care of.
• Designing the SLA for the hybrid architecture is quite complex and in the actual process during the enforcement of the same there is much to do with the operational consistency in both the clouds. Resource management is also quite complex.
• Sys-admin skills required are quite higher level. If there is no availability of the competent staff, there is chance for the failure of the system.
• There is need for security compliance, service and protocol synchronization of high degree in hybrid architectures. Incase if there is any mismatch of the synchronization process there is every chance that the system will fail(Zisis,2012).
• There are risks of authentication of double identity management related failures in the system. Hence every care should be taken to stream line the processes.

Table 1Risk List and possible control strategies

There is need to use all type of securities in the hybrid architecture. Particular focus is required to make on the Deterrent controls, preventive controls, Detective controls, and Corrective controls (Krutz&vines, 2010). All these should make the system automatically secured and this in turn will work for the betterment of the security of the hybrid system in general (Srinivasan et al., 2012). Security alliance can be managed with Cloud application security brokers (CASB).

Following are minimum recommendations for BCP:

System elasticity need to be managed with the usage of application resilience. There should not be any scope for the system latency, should have any problem with the compliance failure. Also there is need for SoftArc to focus on eliminating the logistical barriers to the system(So,2011).

Failure and Recovery aspects need to be focussed more. There should be data redundancy ensured. Backup of the data is quite essential and there should have all the measures taken to ensure that these measures are taken in the due course of time. For linux Redhat OS, cloud recovery systems can be employed. Some of the applications like Amanda, Sback up can be employed. There is need for all such security systems to be implemented in accordance with the system integration and implementation protocols(Grobauer et al., 2011).  

There is scope for the Azure server management to function both on the premise and in the remote cloud based operations. It can be used as resource management software. Apart from this there are several other similar resources available for SoftArc to manage the Resources on cloud. Virtualization of the services will provide all the necessary betterment of the resource management in the cloud services. There is every chance that AWS can provide maximum efficiency for these applications. S3, Route 53 are useful applications in this direction. However there is need for the selection of the right SLA for the sake of communication as well as for trouble shooting and related application requirements. 

1. First step is to activate the AWS management console using SQL server.
2. AQS CLI tools and AWS SDK are other alternative uses
3. Instance need to be launched.
4. Transfer the instance on to the EC2(Amazon)
5. AMIS can be utilized for the above process
6. Complete the licensing process for the deployment
7. Complete the selection of the instance in the process
8. Complete the process using the virtual cloud like VPC

1. Extensive preplanning of the resources and the timings is required
2. The work need to be started with simple work and should proceed with incremental increase.
3. Deploy life cycle management techniques
4. The entire experience of the process need to be simple and future proof as well.
5. There is need for building the compelling intranet facility as well(Rosado et al., 2012). 

1. Main problems will be with the volume and the actual content need to be migrated on to the network.
2. There can be issues while granting the permissions and controls for the migration process.
3. While doing authorization process and granting permissions, several issues need to be taken care of. Failure at any juncture on the hybrid cloud will result in failure of the migration.
4. There is possible leakage of data during the process.
5. Confidential data leakage is definitely a problem in the cloud process if there is any leakage on the cloud computing and failure of the  authorization process(Pahl et al., 2013).

References:

Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2011). The NIST definition of cloud computing.

Gong, C., Liu, J., Zhang, Q., Chen, H., & Gong, Z. (2010, September). The characteristics of cloud computing. In Parallel Processing Workshops (ICPPW), 2010 39th International Conference on (pp. 275-279). IEEE.

Zissis, D., & Lekkas, D. (2012). Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation computer systems, 28(3), 583-592.

Grobauer, B., Walloschek, T., & Stocker, E. (2011). Understanding cloud computing vulnerabilities. IEEE Security & Privacy, 9(2), 50-57.

Krutz, R. L., & Vines, R. D. (2010). Cloud security: A comprehensive guide to secure cloud computing. Wiley Publishing.

So, K. (2011). Cloud computing security issues and challenges. International Journal of Computer Networks, 3(5), 247-55.

Qian, L., Luo, Z., Du, Y., & Guo, L. (2009, December). Cloud computing: An overview. In IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (pp. 626-631). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Pahl, C., Xiong, H., & Walshe, R. (2013, September). A comparison of on-premise to cloud migration approaches. In European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (pp. 212-226). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Rosado, D. G., Gómez, R., Mellado, D., & Fernández-Medina, E. (2012). Security analysis in the migration to cloud environments. Future Internet, 4(2), 469-487.

Srinivasan, M. K., Sarukesi, K., Rodrigues, P., Manoj, M. S., & Revathy, P. (2012, August). State-of-the-art cloud computing security taxonomies: a classification of security challenges in the present cloud computing environment. In Proceedings of the international conference on advances in computing, communications and informatics (pp. 470-476). ACM.

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