Cloud Computing Assignment: Boosting Work Flexibility, Reliability, And Responsiveness With Metasoft

Question

Task: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. Y our task is to:

Prepare a PowerPoint briefing for the MetaSoft board. Your briefing should:

1. Explain the main concepts of Cloud Computing and why you think that a move to the Cloud could be good for MetaSoft;
2. Explain some of the Cloud Architectures that you think would be useful for MetaSoft to use as part of their Cloud infrastructure
3. 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:

1. Provide MetaSoft with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff;
2. Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach;
3. Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose. Your report should be no longer than 2 pages.

MetaSoft has data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian data centres are linked by a fibre based WAN, which is supplied and maintained by a local Telco, and data is replicated between the data centres daily. The two data centres each run x86 based servers attached to a HPE 3PAR SAN with 1PB of storage. They also have a series of RHEL 6 servers (Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.0) that are used to host Web pages and various Web services. The RHEL 6 servers are located only in the Sydney data centre. MetaSoft is considering initially moving its Web infrastructure to a public Cloud, but they are unsure of whether they should migrate to an IaaS or PaaS solution. You are to write a report for the MetaSoft board that:

1. Describes the difference between infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider and a platform provided by a PaaS provider in a public Cloud. You will need to discuss the critical differences, issues and factors, other than cost, that MetaSoft will have to consider in choosing to migrate their Web infrastructure to either an IaaS or a PaaS service provider. Your report should take no more than two pages

MetaSoft is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. MetaSoft has deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2013 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its 100 employees. The SharePoint 2013 instance has been extensively customised to suit MetaSoft’s needs and also runs Project Central, their Project Management tool as a separate application from within SharePoint. All employees have the Microsoft Office 2013 suite of office automation products installed on their respective desktops or laptops. MetaSoft would like to move its SharePoint 2013 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users in remote or overseas locations. MetaSoft want you to report on:

1. What are the major differences between the models IaaS, PaaS and SaaS?
2. Recommend the model that you consider most appropriate for this service and discuss why this model is the most appropriate for the SharePoint service.
3. What are the most likely problems that MetaSoft will encounter with the model that you recommend? How would you advise MetaSoft to deal with these issues?
4. Your report for this question should be no more than 3 pages.

Answer

Executive Summary
This Cloud Computing assignment investigates how MetaSoft contributes towards boosting business work flexibility, reliability, and responsiveness. MetaSoft Ltd is a software development company that serves clients in Australia and New Zealand. MetaSoft is considering migrating few of its computer infrastructures to the cloud. The MetaSoft Council is considering this initiative to boost company's work flexibility, reliability, and responsiveness and save on the cost of maintaining an ICT infrastructure. This report included different approaches which help a company and providing proper office automation services to staff, benefits as well as issues with every approach is also included in this report. Difference between cloud computing based infrastructures provided by using the IaaS provider moreover a platform offered by the PaaS provider in the public Cloud is also discussed in the report. Critical differences, factors, and issues other than the cost, that MetaSoft will need to consider is also highlighted. Finally, major differences between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS model and the most suitable model and issues related to that model which is suitable for MetaSoft Ltd is also discussed in this report.

Part 2
Different approaches providing office automation to MetaSoft’s staff
This Cloud Computing assignment work flexibility, reliability, and responsiveness evaluated suitable approaches to offer or to provide proper office-automation for MetaSoft Ltd. MetaSoft Ltd will use different methods of providing office automation for their engineers. Office automation includes integrating a computer-based approach in the office for all information-related processes or activities such as data storage, information gathering furthermore analysis. Computer machines and software likewise automatically optimize existing office programs. For MetaSoft Ltd g offices, office automation requires two methods.

Functional approach: The automated or computerized office system takes into account MetaSoft Ltd personnel. It focuses more on the work quality and they have to perform several technical tasks within the office. All handwritten and manual work performed in the MetaSoft Ltd office will become electronic (Beimborn, Miletzki & Wenzel, 2011).

Quality of work approach: This approach focuses more on the effect of the office system on motivating employees. MetaSoft Ltd needs office automation systems to motivate them to work harder. Because of the nature or quality of the work, they are on-site and within the office, MetaSoft Ltd needs a unique system that makes their work easier or smooth so that they can perform their functions in the office (Bellavista, Corradi, Foschini & Pernafini, 2014). Automation systems should also provide accurate information electronically to help them improve the quality of the work. The quality of the work approach focuses on completely improving office processes with new automation systems.

Major benefits and issues with each approach
Advantages and disadvantages of Functional approach
Advantage: The functional approach focuses on the company's capabilities, making it effective in task specialization. They ensure efficient processing of data storage; management and exchange in the MetaSoft Ltd. MetaSoft Ltd will be completely able to complete a variety of tasks in a short time.

Disadvantage: Due to specialization, this method is restricted to the tasks they perform such as, if a company changes communications instead of engineering, they will need to add different automation systems (Comendador & Guillo, 2014). Training will be conducted to comprehend how a system works, which may bring more cost to the company.

Advantages and disadvantages of Quality of work approach
Advantage: The quality of life is getting more and more attention from the organization. Quality of life includes the sum of the health experiences experienced by individuals in all aspects of life. An important part of the quality of life is the quality of life that members of the organization experience in the workplace (Rekik, Boukadi & Abdallah, 2015). Having a work environment that promotes good quality work not only increases mood but also increases productivity (Zúñiga-Prieto, González-Huerta, Insfran & Abrahão, 2016).

Disadvantage: Implementing a management approach in a company needs extensive training for employees, which requires them to spend some time on their daily work? While these improvements do decrease lead times, eliminate time waste and to increase productivity, the initial stages of implementing the management approach in the organization can decrease worker output.

Summary
The functional approach is completely considered to be a second paradigm of the psychology. This idea concentrates on the function of a psychological process involving consciousness (Zabolotnyi, Leitner, Hummer & Dustdar, 2015). This idea is another way of structuralism, and this is the first paradigm. The method also collects data from the field and transforms it into functional information that will be used for the analysis and decision making in MetaSoft Ltd (Fowler & Bridges, 2012).

Part 3,
Infrastructure provided IaaS provider vs. PaaS provider
The major distinction between both infrastructures is when MetaSoft organization gets the access to cloud structure, then all the desktops utilized by the organization do not perform the genuine or real computing functions (Zabolotnyi, Leitner, Hummer & Dustdar, 2015). Computing is done inside a tremendous data centre, which is placed somewhere outside of the enterprise and workers check all the outcomes just on their computer screens though in locally-hosted framework, employees have to perform all tasks and work manually. IaaS infrastructure is a major administrative foundation of a cloud computing. In IaaS infrastructure, the computing resources specified are generally developed by the more virtualized hardware. MetaSoft data will completely be in very safe data centre or in the terminals which might likewise offer multi-site configuration when any disaster occurs within the MetaSoft. The PaaS model provides the infrastructure in the public Cloud that assists in backup facility which is not available in locally-hosted framework. In PaaS backups of data are made dependably and the enterprise can link from almost everywhere. The enterprise still creates backup of its applications with little disruption (Hummer, 2014).

Critical factors & issues to migrate
The major critical factors and issues other than cost which MetaSoft surely considers before choosing to move their Web structure to IaaS or to PaaS service supplier.

Reliability of data: The big factor of the cloud computing IaaS model is its primary advantage, i.e., its ability to outsource the IT burden to any specific provider. It is the biggest disadvantage of IaaS service provider because if an enterprise thinks to migrate IaaS or PaaS cloud model enterprise, it has to provide complete access to easily run the sensitive data to its IaaS governed IT section, therefore, the enterprise has an issue of control and reliability of its sensitive data.

Privacy and data Compliance: Security or privacy might also be a big issue which an enterprise faces while they decide to moving to cloud PaaS or IaaS model, mainly, if the organization like , MetaSoft wants to completely manage and control its sensitive data. The compliance of data is also a big issue or factor which affects the enterprise within the IaaS cloud framework (Sill, 2016).

Part 4
Differences between IaaS, SaaS and , PaaS
SaaS: SaaS is similar to an old client software provisioning model, where the client (in this model typically a web browser) provides access to the software easily running on the server. SaaS model is the well-known form of the cloud services for the consumers. SaaS transfers the management software as well as its deployment tasks to the intermediary services. The well-known business SaaS applications include CRM applications for example, Salesforce, Software Suites like Google Apps (Gupta & Pathak, 2016).

PaaS: PaaS is less functional as compared to SaaS and provides a good platform to easily develop as well as to deploy the software. PaaS provider abstracts work of a processing server as well as provides the customer with an environment in which OS, server software, and underlying server network and hardware infrastructure, allow users to freely focus on the MetaSoft business side scalability, as well as application development for their products and services.

IaaS: IaaS providers provide this cloud as well as associated resources through dashboards and APIs. IaaS clients or users have access to storage servers, just like other traditional servers, however with access to high level of scalability. IaaS users can contract out and build “virtual data hub” in a cloud as well as access some of the similar technology and resource functions of the traditional data centres without investing in the capacity planning or their physical management and maintenance (Li & Li, 2013).

Model most appropriate for this service
For MetaSoft Ltd services PaaS is the best model. PaaS is a cloud computing architecture and provides users with managed development kits, application management capabilities and database tools (Sill, 2016). PaaS provides a worry-free way to install internal hardware and software to develop or run new applications. It won't replace the entire infrastructure of your business. Instead, companies rely on PaaS providers to provide a variety of key services, such as application hosting or Java development (Li & Li, 2013). However, PaaS providers provide MetaSoft Ltd a strong platform through which customers can develop, run, and moreover manage applications without maintaining the infrastructure complexity associated with launching and developing applications. To start using the platform, users only need to log in through the web browser interface (Sala-Zárate & Colombo-Mendoza, 2012).

Most likely problems that MetaSoft will encounter and method how MetaSoft to deal with these issues
SSL protocol & implementation flaws: The biggest threat to the PaaS users is SSL-based risks and attacks. The SSL is a foundation of the most "security" used in cloud, and in this case, it is usually the Internet. The current concern of the hacker community is that breaking the SSL will be the main attack vector in the coming future. Hence, it is necessary to taking possible steps or measures to lessen attacks on the SSL should be secondary and only ensure that the application is not subject to the default attack (Padilla, Milton & Johnson, 2015).

As for alleviating these threats and risks, they will be concrete implementations. MetaSoft Ltd has to complete rely on an application supplier to offer detailed information on how they relate the right configuration as well as patch in an appropriate manner. Timeliness is significant; MetaSoft Ltd has to make sure that they have a proper change management program that allows for rapid patching and SSL changes.

Insecure or illegal permissions on the cloud data: Major threat or risks that PaaS infrastructure users have to address is ensuring proper permissions to the data or information stored in a cloud. Although this seems to be given, many of the applications MetaSoft Ltd might perform safety testing and have a serious information leak because the underlying permissions settings for the data are incorrect. From a security perspective, this means granting too many access rights (R. & Borse, 2018).

There are two aspects to this mitigation: Designing of MetaSoft’s application to use rough security furthermore ensuring that all users of an application need to be authenticated before using an application. In this way, MetaSoft can apply the suitable permissions to their delicate data, and application makes access control and managed decisions based on the user authentication (Rajasree & Elizabeth, 2016).

References
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