Evolution of Computing Technology Service Architecture

Question: Describe about the Report for Evolution of Computing Technology of Service Architecture. Answer: Introduction The evolution of computing technology over the last decade has given rise to cloud computing which offers immense potential in providing IT as a service. Cloud computing corresponds to a fundamental change in terms of how IT services are provisioned, deployed, scaled, updated and maintained while keeping costs down. Cloud services are available as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and other models. Cloud deployments come in three major models namely private cloud, public cloud and hybrid clouds. The resources and services can be availed by a business company from a cloud service provider (CSP) on pay-per-usage basis (Marston, Li, Bandyopadhyay, Zhang, Ghalsasi, 2011). This implies the business company will incur only operating costs for the service used. For example, if storage space of 2 GB is used, the company will pay for the amount of storage utilized in the cloud infrastructure. Business perspectives of cloud services As organizations undergo expansion, there is more dependency on IT which is viewed as a business enabler because latest technologies have the capabilities to provide strategic directions for business growth and profits. However, investing in technology will force organizations to incur high capital costs in deploying hardware, software and maintenance. In addition to capital costs, the business company also has to incur operating costs for maintaining their internal infrastructure (Roehrig, 2009). In order to overcome these issues CSP providers offer platforms, infrastructure (servers, network, storage, etc.) and software services which can be availed from CSPs. All these cloud features can benefit the organization to have access to latest technology, incur only operating costs and focus more on business outcomes. From the business perspective cloud computing helps organizations (Aljabre, 2012) in the following ways: Cost benefit: Cloud does not incur capital expenditure the company will spend money only for cloud services which is very less compared to deploying and maintaining an internal infrastructure. IT is flexible and continuously available: Cloud services allow users to access from any device which has internet connectivity. Resources and applications in cloud systems can be accessed from any browser software (IE, FireFox, etc.). Therefore flexibility and mobility are important benefits that allow business people to have access to company data while travelling. Easy maintenance and upgrades: The entire cloud infrastructure (servers, storage, network bandwidth, software, etc.) are maintained by the CSP. This is another cost saving for the organization. Further, any software upgrades, etc. are done instantly to affect all users automatically since all the software and data are centralized in the cloud. Improved Security: Ensuring security is also the responsibility of CSP. CSPs offer good in-depth security in their data centers. The business company may not have any concerns related to data loss or virus attacks and other forms of threat. Cloud services ensure business continuity because IT is available to all users I the company at all times. The CSP makes adequate measure to ensure data is available to the organizations at all times, even during a disruption. Conclusion The report covers cloud service models and the role played by cloud computing in a business organization. Clouds offer many benefits with potential to reduce IT costs for the organization. Business organizations can always consider availing cloud services to take care of their entire IT needs. 2. ABC Payrolls is a fictitious company who has locally hosted its payroll application for their customers (mostly small businesses, sole traders and individuals). You are required to prepare a report on the benefits and challenges for ABC Payrolls to migrate to a SaaS provider. Your report must be 500-700 words length. ABC Payrolls is a company providing payroll services to many small businesses and traders. Their payroll software is a web based database application which is hosted within their on-premise servers to provide payroll processing and reporting to various clients. The responsibility of maintaining the entire IT operations lies with this company. The company faces multiple challenges in providing payroll services to their clients. The challenges are: High cost of IT maintenance. The money spent for maintaining hardware, software, services and personnel is high. During hardware upgrades or modifications to the software the company has to stop their services for clients. Their clients often see this as a disruption. ABC Payrolls incurs high cost for hardware upgrades. In situations, when more clients are added to their database, there is a need for additional hardware. The additional hardware purchased becomes redundant soon when clients leave or their volume reduces. This is another issue of scalability. Application, user security, data availability, off-site storage, etc. are other constant challenges faced by ABC Payrolls. In order to improve their payroll services, ABC Payrolls can consider moving their database software and applications to SaaS cloud model which promises to overcome all these challenges along with additional benefits. SaaS cloud delivers software and application as a service over the internet to any user anywhere from a centralized location. This feature can benefit ABC Payrolls because the SaaS cloud model offers continuous availability of payroll software to multiple clients. By moving the payroll software to SaaS, ABC Payrolls can have the following benefits: The payroll software and database is available to all clients at all times. Multiple device support is also available. Connectivity issues are overcome, since SaaS cloud provider will take care of necessary, network and bandwidth issues. The company can focus more on effective services to clients. In cloud models, data control, security and data protection along with compliance to government regulations are maintained (ENISA, 2009). ABC Payrolls can have an arrangement with SaaS provider to ensure tighter security controls, self-managed off-site storage, encryption and identity management (Edwards, 2008). The issue of scalability and disruptions during upgrades are eliminated. The SaaS provider will ensure all applications database along with client data and services are available without disruptions. ABC Payrolls can completely eliminate the money spent on hardware purchases, and also reduce IT staff which is another cost saving for them. The company will spend money only for the services availed from SaaS cloud provider which is the operating cost. ABC Payrolls prior to moving their data, applications and software to a SaaS must also consider the following points to ensure the migration is successful and their clients are not facing any issue (Tan, Liu, Sun, 2013). This is because usually in cloud migration, companies face multiple challenges. In order to overcome the challenges, ABC Payrolls must consider the following points prior to SaaS migration, Business issues such as data and/or applications lock-in. ABC Payrolls must have proper contracting terms to address interoperability issues. In addition to this the company also has to evaluate risks to their data and applications before migrating to SaaS cloud. Data confidentiality, privilege user access, security and data integrity must be considered before migration. Change management plans. The clients of ABC Payrolls must be supported to operate their data and payroll processes in the changed cloud environment. It will be good to have a disaster recovery plan in case outage or data center problems. ABC Payrolls service level agreements (SLA) must consider the aspects of availability, data back up and business continuity at all times. The report covers the aspects of SaaS cloud migration for the company named ABC Payrolls. Though SaaS cloud model offers many advantages in terms of cost and maintenance, there are many challenges to be considered to ensure payroll services are available to all clients at all times. 3. ABC Payrolls might consider migrating to an IaaS service provider for their services. Thus, they have additionally requested a report on the differences between expanding current infrastructure on premise and adapting cloud infrastructure provided by an IaaS Provider. Your report needs to include the critical points, other than cost, that ABC Payrolls would need to consider in choosing to migrate services to a Cloud. Your report to ABC should be 500-700 words length. ABC payrolls offer payroll services to multiple clients from their internal IT infrastructure. Recently, the companys business is growing and their data has increased significantly. Their existing infrastructure has hardware and resource limitations. Due to business growth, their on-premise IT systems infrastructure needs to be replaced with high capacity systems which will likely incur huge capital expenditure. The company is in urgent need to increase their in-house IT structure, but is facing the following challenges, Unable to provision extra resources like storage, bandwidth and compute capacities to efficiently provide services to new clients Problems with scaling dynamically, because when new hardware is installed, the company faces service disruptions which are not well accepted by their clients. Infrastructure maintenance costs are high and hardware becomes obsolete quickly. High costs in testing new software features, and implementing costs are incurred by the company. Hardware purchased becomes redundant which is wastage for the company. Therefore, in order to overcome these problems, ABC Payrolls can consider availing infrastructure services from a cloud provider. IaaS service model provides infrastructure services to organizations according to their needs. The pay-as-you-go model in IaaS cloud is an affordable option for organizations that are facing high costs in hardware and maintenance (Douglas, 2010). IaaS cloud offers servers, network, storage and others to include back up, disaster recovery and maintenance. IaaS offers complete scalability and flexibility because resources can be provisioned when needed and returned back when not needed (Bhardwaj, Jain, Jain, 2010). This can optimize IT usage for ABC Payrolls. The business benefits derived from migrating to IaaS (Pedia, 2016) for ABC Payrolls include, The focus is on IT. IaaS will ease the challenge of maintaining and managing their on-premise infrastructure. The resources are managed and provisioned by the cloud provider. ABC Payrolls can focus more on their payroll services instead of any concerns with their infrastructure. Continuous availability: Cloud IaaS offers infrastructure without any breakdowns due to hardware failure or during hardware and component upgrades. Scalable and elastic: The hardware needs such as storage, network bandwidth, servers, etc. can be provisioned instantly by ABC Payrolls during peak loads. At the same time the resources can be returned back during normal load. Cost benefit: The pay as you go model will ensure costs incurred for availing any infrastructure is billed only for the resource usage for that period. This can save costs for ABC Payrolls and eliminate the problem of redundant hardware. Further the company will fully eliminate capital costs for new hardware with IaaS. Further IaaS ensures availability and other utility services. ABC Payrolls must also consider the following points before moving to IaaS, A thorough review of buying criteria for long term business benefits. Here ABC Payroll can short list their needs to check their relevance with the IaaS provider offers. Estimate current capacities. This will help ABC Payrolls to use the appropriate amount of resources in IaaS. This will optimize their cost. ABC Payrolls can determine the type of services that can be managed by them. These services must be available with the IaaS provider. The reputation and reliability of IaaS provider must be considered. The company must ensure technical support and assistance without any added fee or charge. By migrating to IaaS the company must ensure their IT processes can streamlined and have better control and more automation. This can be done by understanding IaaS cloud API and integration options. Ensure adequate service agreements related to security, downtime, business continuity, resiliency, scalability, etc. Migrating to IaaS (Fougere, 2015) is an important decision for ABC Payrolls. The company must ensure adequate planning to match internal needs with IaaS. References Bhardwaj, S., Jain, L., Jain, S. (2010). Cloud computing: A study of Infrastructure as a service. International Journal of Engineering and Information Technology , 2, 60-63. Douglas, K. B. (2010). Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Retrieved August 22, 2016, from Service Architecture: https://www.service-architecture.com/articles/cloud-computing/infrastructure_as_a_service_iaas.html Fougere, R. (2015). 7 Important considerations when buying IaaS. Retrieved August 23, 2016, from CARTIKA Web Enabling Business: https://www.cartika.com/blog/buying-iaas/ Pedia, T. R. (2016). Top 10 Benefits of IaaS. Retrieved August 23, 2016, from Top 10 Benefits of IaaS: https://www.theresearchpedia.com/research-articles/top-benefits-of-iaas Edwards, C. (2008, May). Legal Download 2.0 - Advantages and Risks of Software-as-a-Service . Retrieved August 22, 2016, from ITP.net: https://www.itp.net/518351-legal-download-20-advantages-and-risks-of-software-as-a-service ENISA. (2009). Survey: An SME perspective on Cloud Computing. European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). Tan, C., Liu, K., Sun, L. (2013). A design of evaluation method for SaaS in cloud computing. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management , 6 (1), 1-12. Aljabre, A. (2012). Cloud Computing for Increased Business Value. International Journal of Business and Social Science , 3 (1), 234-240. Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., Ghalsasi, A. (2011). Cloud computing The business perspective. Decision Support Systems , 51, 178-190. Roehrig, P. (2009). New Market Pressures Will Drive Next-Generation IT Services Outsourcing. Forrester Research Inc.