Models of Cloud Computing-Free-Samples for Students-Myassignment

Question: Discuss about the "Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing for Businesses". Answer: Introduction Globally, business have incorporated Technology in their business operations with aim of making service delivery more dynamic (Truong 2010, p. 5). To organizations which have already adopted Technology, they have gained competitive advantages compared to their competitors. In current business world, many of the advanced organizations have changed their scale on Technology. They have gone a step ahead to adopt a more dynamic technology such as cloud computing technology which facilitates storage of data in the space. Similarly, other services such as application can be offered from the space without necessarily installing them on the client machine or a workstation. In view of the services offered online by some companies, cloud computing has become so reliable by many of the organizations which feel storing data on their own is quite delicate and expensive (Krutz Vines 2010, p. 20). Despite many advantages from adoption of cloud computing, there are still some drawbacks which organi zations find challenging when planning to invest in cloud computing. It would be quite important for organizations to research and evaluate on type of business services which would be offered from cloud before opting for the service. Project Objective The main goal is to determine if organizations benefit from cloud computing investment. It has to focus on evaluating whether cloud computing offers benefits to all business irrespective of their size and determine if there is a major beneficiary in cloud computing between customers and service providers. Project scope This project involves evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing to businesses. It covers advantages that various businesses have realized by adopting cloud computing in their daily operations. Google Inc, Zappos and IBM are some of organizations that would be used to evaluate the context of the project. It has to evaluate benefits and disadvantages as they are realized by both customers and service providers. Literature Review Businesses that have adopted cloud computing services in their operation has following benefits; IBM has realized substantial benefits because its customers are able to deliver quality IT services. According to Marston et al (2011, p. 78), through cloud computing, Technological services are delivered smoothly to various customers efficiently and from the globe. In addition, IBM realized how cloud computing could help in enhancing ways in which it can meet organizational Technological resource demand. In turn, IBM has gone an extra mile in implementing successful cloud computing in its business operations. It is quite interesting to have IBM praising how cloud computing has helped it to respond effectively to its organizational customer needs. In one of the interesting scenarios, through cloud computing, IBM has been able to offers to its esteemed customers flexible and very scalable solutions when demands of services has been high such that, organizational IT staff cannot meet custom er need due to high demand of the a given product (Armbrust et al 2010, p. 45). Through implementation of cloud computing, IB has been able to offer servers with high storage and networking capability with a short period of time compared to previous experience when there was no cloud computing services. Moreover, it is through cloud computing that, IBM has been able to improve on its productivity services from European benchmark center. The center has been used by customers to test if provided IT resources work as expected by international standards. Through European benchmark center, cloud computing has reduced selling cycle time and has resulted to increase in center capacity (Hofmann Woods 2010, p. 23). Hence, high profit margin from IBMs increased business activities. In other IBM research centers such as Watson and Zurich, cloud computing has been a major tool in scheduling and completing more than expected projects. With help of cloud computing technology, IBM has been able to provide requested research software within short period of time and in many remote locations. In return, IBM has evidenced better utilization of resources, consolidation of capital budgeting within organization and increase in scale of production (Sultan 2010, p. 56). Further, in current diverse busines s environment, cloud computing is known to improve business value since IT specialists and professionals can give out a lot of their time in strategizing on how to increase the value of IT services in their business. Through cloud computing, it is possible for organizations to liberate liberates its services that it used to do before discover of cloud computing services. Truong (2010, p. 63) asserts that, it is only through cloud computing that, it has been possible to avail some IT applications and their related infrastructure in a more dynamic way despite location of the customer. Increase in service delivery has been due to ability to initiate tasks that can help in creating, configuring and adding extra computing power in order to support IT organizational business service delivery. As a result of enhanced service delivery, it increases customer delivery trust making it easy to enhance market coverage. Consequently, according to Aljabre (2012, p. 102), cloud computing has demonstrated ability to promote Technological optimization which helps in configuring IT resources more effectively while organization cost-benefits. IT resources optimization has been made possible due to the fact that, cloud computing has ability to support high business scalability while meeting any period of high demand. At the same time, it has to be so flexible to avoid underutilization of available IT capacity. It has been possible to regulate IT resource utilization by worldwide through use of cloud computing. As most of business realize the importance of cloud computing, it is would be good to make sure they achieve resilient. In this regard, IMB has gone an extra mile in offering cloud validation application which is used to confirm the resiliency of any organization offering its services through cloud computing. Through use of IBM validation program, customers are able to identify and partner with verif ied service providers that have undergone rigorous evaluation on their capability to offer services (Leavitt 2009, p. 12). This makes cloud computing customers get quality service with all expected benefits from cloud computing. Finally, data storage in cloud computing services has proved to be very secure since there are no risks that can be associated employees deleting or tempering with stored organizational data. In relation to organizational data security, data availability is assured all times by the service provider through cloud computing (Truong 2010, p. 71). Security is a duty to the hosting company and it has to guarantee its customers no data risk would be encountered and privacy of the information would be at the topmost priority. Cloud computing has become norm of the todays business due to competitive advantage that many of the organization has been reaping. After some of the companies analyze how peer companies have successfully employed cloud computing in their business operation, they have been forgetting there are still consequences that are associated with cloud computing. First, data stealing has been a major issue that organizations implement cloud computing has been faced with (Dikaiakos 2009, p. 10). It has been evidenced that, number of internet users has increased substantially probing system attacks through viruses, worms and cyber terrorists. A good example was witnessed in Google Inc, where there servers were hacked. It has been observed that, adopting cloud computing has become one of the highest rated issue in cyber security. This has become a major concern since service providers are faced with challenge of securing other organizational data. Some of the areas which has been of interest by m any organization include; organizational databases, systems operating and transaction (Abadi 2009, p. 33). In a different scenario, Zappos Company was affected by cyber theft where over 24 million account details were stolen including credit card information. It is very clear that, data stealing has been a major issues in the cloud computing because some of service providers cannot guarantee safety of their customers data. Similarly, according to Jensen et al (2009, p. 201), malware Injection Attack has been so widespread where organizational systems has been compromised by hackers. This has been common to organizations hosting their services on the cloud. In normal circumstances, hackers target organizational hosted application by finding out on their vulnerabilities then change their normal way of business operations. When a vulnerability is identified on cloud hosted system, an application is created to help in injecting malware in subject organizational services. Through such activities, the hacker is able to have control of the data or listen to sensitive data flow flowing through organizational communication channels. When hackers gain access to organizational servers, they try to compromise data or take control of the entire organizational data resulting to system unavailability. From Google Inc instance, the attacker gained access to organizational database and copied all sensitive information such as credit card numbers and clients account details. A lot of sensitive data went to the wrong people due to use of cloud computing technology without proper security implementation (Lawson, Wolthuis Cooke 2010, p. 97). Therefore, before any organization can opt to venture on cloud computing services, it is important to analyses if there is enough security to host their data. Some of the scripts that are mostly used by hackers to gain access to organizational cloud systems include; HTML and VBScripts. Additionally, cloud computing has been blamed by many organization due to its inability to have data privacy. Cloud computing makes data available to all organizations in unencrypted form. The problem of data privacy has been complicated by lack of lack of system control and failure to follow regulation set to offer data protection (Subashini Kavitha 2011, p. 109). It has been a common norm that, many of organization upload their data to cloud in order to share without knowledge of issues that might be caused by data privacy and confidentiality. Rules of data confidentiality and privacy holds that, personal and organizational information has to be safeguard from unauthorized access in order to maintain secrecy of operation and conducting business. In cloud computing, privacy has been a major issues since organizations do not know where their data is stored, who has control over it and what has been happening on it. Besides data privacy, there has been Denial of Services (DoS) which has become another issue on service availability offered by cloud computing service providers. Through use of various types of attacker, hackers make cloud services inaccessible to certain organization by bringing all its services down (Krutz Vines 2010, p. 263). One of the common known DoS has been on network level where organizational network is completely taken down by sending a lot of traffic to the servers to make them inaccessible. The main target of the hacker is to overload the server such that it cannot provide service requested by the customer. Consequently, in the era where technology is becoming obsolete so fast, cloud computing technology and infrastructure has been changing so fast forcing organizations to incur a lot of cost to overhaul current data centers. In reference to research done in 2007, it was found that before 2012, most of organizations would be required to modify their data centers in order to keep in with required cloud computing technology (Kaufman 2009, p. 58). These changes are getting their way in to the market due to; users increase in demand where almost entire technological society is in need of having real time data access and in a secure computing environment. High customers expectations have resulted to creation of data centers that IT administrators are not able to meet their requirements. Finally, most of data centers are composed of different collections ranging from Operating System that support entire cloud computing applications, hardware and other application systems that have accumulated for several years without update. This scenario gives rise to high demand of having so many system images without knowledge of IT administrators. Buyya, Beloglazov Abawajy (2010, p. 14) argues that, with this complex system within an organization, it may require technical staff in order to be able to troubleshoot issues that may arise form data centers as well as reduce risks that are associated with outages of required services by customers. Increase in amount of services being offered by cloud computing providers, more services are still getting their way into the cloud. This is increasing demand of services from various users who are using different devices and operating system resulting to increased data management. Conclusion To customers who have opted for cloud computing, they have gone ahead to dump other costly operational systems since with cloud services, they are able to incur very minimal cost of managing the system when compared to inbuilt systems. With cloud services being accessible from anywhere and anytime, organizations are able to reduce expenses incurred while hosting many employees in offices since most of the offered services can be managed from single computer from individual home. This has been made possible by the fact that, cloud computing services are accessible from anywhere but just click of a button. Lastly, important to remember is that cloud computing has its drawbacks that limits many of the small business from venturing in it. It would be wise to have a thorough research before investing in cloud computing services. References Abadi, D. J. 2009. Data management in the cloud: Limitations and opportunities. IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 32(1), 3-12. Aljabre, A. 2012. Cloud computing for increased business value. International Journal of Business and social science, 3(1). Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A. Zaharia, M. 2010. A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 50-58. Buyya, R., Beloglazov, A., Abawajy, J. 2010. Energy-efficient management of data centerresources for cloud computing: a vision, architectural elements, and open challenges. arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.0308. Dikaiakos, M. D., Katsaros, D., Mehra, P., Pallis, G., Vakali, A. 2009. Cloud computing: Distributed internet computing for IT and scientific research. 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