Introduction to Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has become an evolution in the modern era with the help of wide varieties of technologies that are put together for changing organization’s approach in building Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Cloud computing will reply on sharing of wide range of resources such as networks, storage devices, applications, services, servers that run the applications etc. With the help of these resources, cloud takes the opportunity to enhance and also effectively use the resources that shared resources on cloud (Gamaleldin, 2013).
The two main advantages of the cloud computing architecture are: it is easy to use and it’s cost effectiveness in maintaining the shared resources over cloud. With its huge popularity and also effective usage, there are issues that threaten cloud computing infrastructure. The primary issue in cloud computing is security. Security is considered as one of the threatening issue that reduces the growth of the cloud and its business. With security, come the data security, data privacy, and data protection that will stand before cloud to enhance and provide best support system to safeguard data (Harris, 2016).
- Cost reducer – the billing of cloud is pay per usage. Hence, deploying cloud architecture on cloud will definitely reduce the cost for an organization. Initial and recurring expenses are significantly much lower than that of traditional computing architecture (Harris, 2016).
- Increased storage – with cloud’s tending technology, it became a dream true for all the organizations that the cloud can operate on any big data and service providers will make sure that the data are more reliable, managed effectively and also can be used efficiently.
- Flexibility – as the business conditions of organizations will be changing rapidly, cloud computing will make sure that application will be taken to the market quickly with the help of appropriate configuration blocks in deployment (Harris, 2016).
There are three major types of categories that cloud providers offer as a service. They are:
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – In this type of model, complete application will be provided to the customer so that the service is used on demand basis. In this type of service, a service is run on the single instance and multiple end users can get connected and services can be provided to them. From customer’s side, they don’t need to invest on servers or on any software licenses because costs are lowered and also, just a single application has to be hosted and also maintained. SaaS is provided by the big market companies such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce etc. (Harris, 2016).
- Platform as a service (PaaS) – in this type of model, a development environment is been encapsulated and this development environment will be offering service. On this type of model, higher levels of services can be built and maintained. The user will be provided freedom in-order to build applications of his own that can be run on the cloud provider’s infrastructure. In order to meet scalability and manageability of the application, PaaS provides a combination of operating systems and application servers. For example LAMP platform which is Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. Examples of PaasS are Google’s App Engine and force.com (Harris, 2016)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – this type of model provides simple storage and also provides basic computing capabilities as services on the network. To handle workloads, this model provides servers, storage systems, data managing space centers (Harris, 2016), networking equipment configuration etc. In this model, customer will deploy the software owned by him on the infrastructure.
Organizations have the option to choose any of the cloud architecture based on the requirement that the organization should provide to its customers. After choosing one of the clouds, they can deploy the cloud on their infrastructure. Organizations should be smart enough to decide the type of cloud model, an organization needs and moreover, cost should be kept in mind while the decision is to be taken. There are three basic types of cloud. They are (Furht & Escalante, 2010 ):
- Public cloud – in this architecture, cloud is maintained, operated and managed by the third party service provider. This model provides customers to use the cloud service when the customer is in need that is customer is asked to pay as the customer starts using cloud infrastructure effectively. This is of type “Pay-as-you-go” model (Harris, 2016). In public cloud, all the customers that are connected to the cloud will be provided less bandwidth and also with limited configuration, security issue is a major setback in the public cloud. The cloud infrastructure can be bigger than that of the enterprise cloud which in return will provide the ability to scale up seamlessly that is on demand.
- Private cloud – the architecture of private cloud is built in such a way that it works for just a single organization or enterprise. A private cloud concern about data which are not secured and protected in public and provides great control over security of the data. Basically there are two variations that are present in the private cloud and they are:
- On-premise cloud – these are also called as internal clouds which are hosted inside one’s own data center. This model provides intensive protection and standardized process too but, it is limited with the respect to size and scalability. For organizations which tend to have complete control over the data and configuration of the infrastructure, they can make use of this cloud architecture in their organization (Harris, 2016).
- Externally hosted private cloud (Harris, 2016)– as the name suggests, this type of cloud architecture will have a host who is a third party service provider and this third party will provide exclusive cloud services with guaranteed privacy over data. This type of cloud architecture suites for organizations that doesn’t want their data to be shared to everyone on the cloud.
- Hybrid cloud – hybrid cloud is a combination of both public and private cloud. In Hybrid model, organizations can utilize the resources provided by the service provider in either full manner or in a partial manner which in return will increase the flexibility of cloud computing. The Hybrid cloud is built on such environment that it is capable of providing services which are on-demand and also on externally provisioned scale.
- Hybrid cloud has the ability to have on-premises infrastructure which can help in supporting average workload of the business (Tracy, 2016).
- Hybrid cloud is not been pushed on the public internet and this helps in reducing access time and also latency in comparison with public cloud.
- Capacity extension – when an organization wishes to add capacity on-premises which generally are of high cost, organization should think for upgrading power and cooling inside of data centers so that additional racks will be added for the new data center. This becomes the best alternative because the data are stored at a single entity and is much more protected and reduces cost too. Extension of on-premises network will help in reutilization of existing technologies that are present on cloud (Tracy, 2016).
- Planning in advance – most of the needs of an organization is well known in advance. For example, any product launches. When it is time to scale up the application, organization should focus on workloads and how the overload can be resolved before launch.
- Optimization of network – cloud which hosts will provide the opportunity for shifting heavy lift of the network off-premises and in this process, it improves reliability, scalability and availability of connection that it holds (Tracy, 2016).
- Multi tenancy – since hybrid cloud is a superset of public and private cloud, it can manage multiple organizations and each organization is maintained by third party service providers and each organization have their own access based authentication process.
- Security – since the data is totally pushed over cloud, there are security threats that have to be handled for securing data which are of higher priority. When moving the data to cloud completely, organization should dump the data which are on off-site so that the data can be more secure and also the data should be kept at just one place which is more secured and also should be authenticated. This helps when the data over cloud gets overloaded because of any issue or attack over cloud. Backing up of data on off-shore is also an important step in securing or protecting data (Tran, 2016).
- Integration or migration to hybrid cloud – when an organization chooses to move its data to cloud, first step that an organization should overcome is configuring the off-shore process to cloud. It has to be noted that the application and the data that exists will be in a symbiotic relationship and both are of high importance. When an organization does research for storing application and data, organization should first consider a case that is like: if the application resides in private cloud and the data resides in on-premises data center, then, will the application that is built will have the access to the data remotely or not. This is very important because directories that have been created by one cannot be used or accessed by other users (Tran, 2016).
- There is a possibility of security breach through public cloud.
- Handle configuration breaches. Most of the organizations fail in migrating data on hybrid cloud so the steps should be noted and at times of reconfiguration, exact same steps should be followed so that the data doesn’t get lost or get out of sync with the configuration (Bluelock, 2011).
- The data which are being migrated to the cloud should be encrypted before the data gets pushed over cloud stream.
- Data when moved to cloud should be in encrypted mode (Bluelock, 2011).
- Audits should be done regularly (Bluelock, 2011).
- Secure remote access at both ends that is at off-shore and also on the cloud.
- Provide authentication that validates first customer on client based infrastructure and also over cloud and here, the data that are present at off-shore and on cloud should be exactly same else, the user will not get authentication and will not be able to access the data.
- Organization should constantly backup the data. This helps in minimizing possibly network overloads or theft of data and also recovers data which are corrupted with the use malwares that were introduced to decrypt the data stored on cloud.
- Background checks are compulsory because once the data is moved to cloud, all the sources of the data should be thrashed and it should be validated.
Organization should pay at most focus on the service level agreements that cloud models provide. For example, SaaS is written on the provider’s interests in mind but not considering needs of the customers. Thus, evaluation should be done before choosing a cloud model to be deployed in the architecture. When SLA is spoken, one has to look up if they are notifying that they handle security breach, will the data be available after the termination of the contract, terms and conditions that gets terminated with the end of license etc (Bedell, 2017).
In PaaS, consumers who are developers will have control on the application side development life cycle but. cannot control the virtual machines that are run by third party service providers. And the SLA of IaaS has the control over infrastructure and also over the virtual machines but, don’t have access to the physical infrastructure at which they reside.
- Identification of cloud actors that is who is the consumer, provider, carrier, broker and auditor (Myerson, 2013).
- Evaluating business policies such as privacy, data preservation etc.
- Understanding of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS
- Security – capabilities of the cloud providers, asset sensitivity
- Being prepared for service failures
- Backup the data of SQL Server.
- Understand the configuration details of the AWS server.
- Make a plan of how the data should be migrated and which data should be moved in which cloud because considering Hybrid cloud, some data is meant for public access and some for private. Hence, it should be clear.
- Establishment of the environment – that is installing application software’s etc (Myerson, 2013)
- Perform a trial on migrating data
- Validate the migrated data and check for data corruption
- Complete the transition from SQL Server to AWS.
- Not backing up of data before migration of the data to AWS.
- Not performing validation checks after trial migration of data.
- Check if the data is being accessible to customers.
- Perform authentication checks.
References
Bedell, C. (2017). SaaS SLAs: What you must have in an agreement. Retrieved May 2017, from Searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com: https://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/feature/SaaS-SLAs-What-you-must-have-in-an-agreement
Bluelock. (2011). Security in the hybrid cloud: Putting rumors to rest. Retrieved from https://ww2.frost.com/files/1614/2113/3098/Whitepaper-VMware_Bluelock_Security_In_The_Hybrid_Cloud.pdf
Furht, B., & Escalante, A. (2010 ). Handbook of Cloud Computing. Florida, US: Springer Science & Business Media.
Gamaleldin, A. M. (2013). An Introduction to Cloud Computing Concepts. Retrieved from https://www.secc.org.eg/recocape/SECC_Tutorials_An%20Introduction%20to%20Cloud%20Computing%20Concepts.pdf
Harris, T. (2016). Cloud Computing – An Overview. Retrieved from https://www.thbs.com/downloads/Cloud-Computing-Overview.pdf
Myerson, J. M. (2013, January 07). Best Practices to develop SLAs for cloud computing. Retrieved from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-slastandards/
Tracy, P. (2016, September 22). Explaining the hybrid cloud, advantages and disadvantages. Retrieved May 2017, from Recwireless.com: https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160922/big-data-analytics/hybrid-cloud-iot-tag31-tag99
Tran, E. (2016). Pros & Cons for Building a Hybrid Cloud for Your Enterprise. Retrieved May 2017, from Actifio.com: https://www.actifio.com/company/blog/post/pros-cons-for-building-a-hybrid-cloud-for-your-enterprise/
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