1. QAC020N254A Cloud Computing
Answer:
Introduction To Cloud Computing
This report discusses about the contexts and evolution of cloud computing which have been
seen massive growth in the past few years. There is further identification of the key drivers
for the implementation of cloud technologies by various multinational organisations and
how it impacts positively or negatively on the business environment. Meanwhile, there is an
assessment of cloud computing as a resource so to which presents an ideal solution for
organisations encompassing their infrastructure or introducing innovative concepts. In
relation to cloud computing, it is the use of networks of remote servers, basically accessed
through the internet for the purpose of storage, management and processing of data.
Considering the progressive rise in a digital and technological environment, cloud
computing is making billions of dollars in revenue annually in contexts to its three service
models known to be platform, software and infrastructure. In 2020, software as a service
(SaaS) signified the major segment of the international cloud computing industry, with 165
billion U.S. dollars in returns (Mlitz, 2021).
The growth and trends in cloud computing change at a leap that can be enraging to follow
and difficult to anticipate and several of those emerging cloud computing developments
stanch from the industry inflowing a stage of standardisation and improved competency – a
sign of maturity in whichever technological sector. In relation to certain illustrations of
cloud computing, cloud services as AWS has been rented to Netflix by Amazon whereas
web-based email services like Gmail and hot mail also use cloud computing services.
Evolution And Transformative Potential Of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing as a term has been nearly from the early 2000s, however, the conception
of computing-as-a-service has been there for much long in the past i.e. 1960s when
computer departments would enable organisations to rent time on a mainframe,
irrespective to purchase one themselves. Furthermore, the 'time-sharing' services were
essentially overhauled by the rise of the Personal Computer which made keeping a
computer higher affordable, and then, later on, the increase of business data centres comes
around where businesses would stock huge extents of data. However, the idea of leasing
2. access to the influence of computing has re-emerged continuously in the application service
providers, utility computing, and grid computing of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was
later on trailed by cloud computing, which essentially took clamp with the advent of
software as a service and hyper scale cloud computing vendors like AWS.
The Current State Of Cloud Computing As A Viable Solution For Businesses
In the current time, the cloud has become an allegory for modern computing itself, where
everything is a service – which can link and combine with other services to come across an
infinite number of application needs. The real potentials, though, arise from the big IaaS
(Infrastructure-as-a-Service) clouds comprising AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Meanwhile, cloud migration proposes flexibility over on-site hardware in relation to
resource ascending to link with user demand. Apart from an inexpensive upfront
investment and no hardware expenditures, functioning via the cloud lets for greater
consistent data security, better solidity, and constant updation. In relation to the current
state of cloud computing, enabling resource provisioning in response to changes in
workload requirements, cloud computing assists companies to configure flexible
architecture to manage dynamic applications. It could help businesses in many ways
including rapid product testing as well as delivery, elastic global scaling, the improved
overall performance of the employee and developer productivity. According to Tabrizchi
and Rafsanjani (2020), the key advantages of shifting the workloads to the cloud comprises
of speed, cost optimization, scalability, improved application performance and reliability.
The Effects For Cloud-Based Computing For Various Major Stakeholders
According to Jouini and Rabai (2016), as many stakeholders take part in cloud computing
services, so did the focus on cloud enablers and their role in offering added capabilities to
the cloud. This cloud based transformation is in its initial stages, and its definitive influence
on stakeholders in relation of value creation is not yet acknowledged. The significant
feature of this change is the transference of investment and impact in relation to design,
structure, emecution and upkeep of IT infrastructure systems and the services backing up
them, in the direction of the cloud value chain player called as the Cloud services provider.
Its key impact can be further seen on regulators and legislators where at the time of
adopting emerging technologies, there could be an allowance of regulations to direct safe
and transparent approaches of data exchange. In terms of end-users, they are given the least
emphasis as many of the researches depict cloud providers and cloud consumers as vital
stakeholders in the value-chain. In the case of developers, it is now possible to develop, test,
and deploy totally new solutions in days or weeks as of rapid ability to deploy solutions in
contexts of cloud computing. Meanwhile, the transformative potential of cloud computing
can be further seen in contexts of enhanced flexibility, strong security measures, real-time
customer feedback and operational improvements.
Cloud Computing Changing The Social And Business Landscape
3. Information is all most significant technology asset and the rising power and usage of
computing, as well as the cloud, enables world-changing leaders, businesses and
entrepreneurs to develop and scale their organisations faster than ever before and to mark
substantial impact with the limited resources. Moreover, this was especially beneficial in
the developing nations where the developers can be allowed them to deploy their software
that lacked the technology infrastructure required to deliver work for employers positioned
on the opposite side of the world. In relation to the business landscape, multi-cloud
strategies are adopted by many businesses for the purpose of increasing agility, minimizing
vendor lock-in, taking gain of best-in-breed solutions, improving cost efficiencies, and rise
flexibility via choice. At the current time, 93% of companies have a multi-cloud tactic and
approach with a means to competently accumulate and exploit their data from each points
(forbes.com, 2020). With developing multi-cloud abilities, it is developed to provide greater
flexibility and choice to run their programs in the utmost competent way.
Driving Factors In The Adoption Of Cloud Technologies And Its Impact On Businesses
The development of current technology has required the company to implant new
technologies to turn out to be higher competitive. In an age where access to technology is
becoming the most significant limiting factor, there are different factors in the adoption of
cloud technologies due to its scalability and innovation’s whereas the continual system
updates reinforce timescales due to the increasing speed of progress, the cloud and
transforming from a nice-to-have solution for clients and businesses to an essential next
step (Hsu and Lin, 2016).
Businesses To Migrate Their Platforms, Infrastructure, Or Software To The Cloud
There are many benefits for the business to migrate their platforms, infrastructure, or
software to the cloud where the first is cost reduction. The companies can cut their
operational expenses as their DevOps specialists and system administrators do not spend
time on back-up and hardware maintenance. Taking an example of Emirates, the airline
moved from on-premises to the cloud so that to decrease the cost of maintenance and
respond to an increase in traffic. It makes the company to be expected a saving of $1 million
after completely retiring its out-of-date hardware (amazon.com, 2020). Meanwhile,
scalability is also one of the advantages where in case of high workload, the company can
quickly respond to peak demands and lower capacity when it is essential whereas all it is
done in an automatic way and thus, save much time and effort. Taking an example of
Yedpay, the company when migrated to the cloud after experiencing a data centre problem
and the company even reduced its costs by 40 percent (amazon.com, 2020a). It is also
necessary for businesses to migrate their platforms to the cloud as to gain higher security in
the digital environment. As per the research by Gartner’s, up to 99 percent of cloud security
failures through 2025 will be the customer’s mistake (gartner.com, 2019). Cloud migration
further helps in delivering reliability for reducing downtimes and lowering data loss risk in
4. the future. Many of the leading vendors have service-level contracts that provide assurance
for 99 percent uptime (Khan and Gouveia, 2018). Furthermore, vendors also bear
accountability for backups and disaster recovery, which may save much time for the
company team.
Innovation Opportunities The Cloud Offers To Businesses
In the present time, the cloud has demonstrated to be an end-to-end strategy that assists
companies to originate insights from real-time data, improving decision-making and taking
advantage of on new opportunities — all to disrupt and distinguish with accelerated
innovation. The environment and culture around cloud software are fast changing and as
per the report by McKinsey, 75 percent of cloud predicted values occurs from accelerating
innovation, with the significance of cloud core projected at $770 billion in innovation-driven
development in associated to $430 billion in cost and risk lessening (mckinsey.com,
2021). At first, the cloud present a pay-as-you-go model with the OpEx Model, which makes
higher space for funds to be flowed into experiences and experimentation, which radically
impact on the overall business development (Mustafa et al, 2019). Meanwhile, the PaaS
(Platform as a service) capabilities of cloud help businesses to not spend much time on
scalability, strengths, provisioning, disposition and automation sides while through
appropriate control, it can streamline the application development lifecycle with presenting
quicker time to marketplace. Most importantly, the cloud has democratized artificial
intelligence and machine learning and it is no longer shortened to an ensiled group of
experts and data researchers.
Challenges And Risks Posed By Cloud Computing
Cloud adoption continues to see significant growth though there are certain challenges and
risks that need to be considered by businesses when migrating to the cloud and using
different applications of cloud computing (Moura and Hutchison, 2016). Compatibility is the
first challenge at the time of adopting cloud computing as cloud environments are becoming
more open in order to upkeep different data types; though, there are still several
restrictions for each cloud deployment in terms of what they were able to work with. There
is being the further risk of lack of control as at the time when a business opted for services
for cloud based provider, it can be challenging to identify like who in control of access to the
data in a cloud service and What occurs a business will not able to accomplish payment. The
next risk could be related to legal and compliances where several data security provisions
aimed to safeguard a particular type of data. For instance, HIPAA (The Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act) needs healthcare providers to guard patient information.
PCI DSS needs anyone who accepts credit cards to protect cardholder information. Hence, if
any of the companies do not have appropriate legal protections, then it may be liable at the
time of data rupture at the cloud service that discloses the organisation data.
The Role Of Cloud Computing As A Resource
5. There are many cloud service providers that aim to deliver secure and reliable service to
their clients and businesses though it is necessary to consider these vendors on the basis of
various factors either it be their support in the cloud migration and their reach in the global
marketplaces or the competitors' offerings.
AWS Support For Client's Migration To The Cloud
AWS and its extensive certified APN Partner community provide the company business with
training, tools, security, and expertise at all stages and for every size of deployment.
Strategic workloads driving on AWS encompass applications including SAP, vSphere-based
workloads like VMware Horizon, SharePoint, and Citrix, and databases including Oracle,
SQL Server and, SAP HANA. Additionally, operating systems from SUSE, Canonical, and
Microsoft all operates on AWS to upkeep critical corporate processes. AWS further allow its
customers to select various choices to update new or existing applications by running
containerized workloads via Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS, or they can go serverless with
AWS Lambda. Meanwhile, AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) delivers customers
with consulting assistance, training, and services acclaim to decrease the threat of migration
to the cloud (Sullivan, 2020). This program also assists consumers to develop a robust
operational basis, and aid in offsetting the early cost of migrations.
AWS And Client’s Needs For SAAS, PAAS And IAAS
As a provider of IaaS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) simplifies much protected,
cost-effective, flexible, and scalable cloud infrastructure and computing capability. As an
IaaS enabler, it also drive it easier for cloud developers to auto-scale resources and creates
web-scale cloud computing simpler. To make sure safe access to resources, AWS presents
Identity and Access Management (IAM) that enables individuals to describe roles and
groups, and offer individuality and access authorisations. For the purpose of SaaS, AWS
offers its clients with complete solutions that are run and administered by AWS
(hubspot.net, 2021). Meanwhile, AWS as a SaaS model embraces a multi-tenant strategy to
make sure services are on a protected and separated space. Meanwhile, with services like
Amazon CloudWatch, companies can end application and infrastructure management in
real-time. In contexts to PaaS, AWS Lambda can be a beneficial server less computing
service that lets the developers to drive their code in the standard runtime environment of
Lambda and they do not need to concern for the server handling with zero supervision
(hubspot.net, 2021).
Advantages And Disadvantages Of AWS
There are many benefits and drawbacks of Amazon Web Services like AWS is easy to use
where this server interface offers access to extensive number of applications and services.
Moreover, AWS has an incredible range of tools while it was initially meant for cloud
6. storage and computing, it is extended into more than seventy additional services (Palumbo
et al, 2021). AWS also have a greater competitive advantage due to having unlimited
capacity in the space. Moreover, businesses might consider AWS due to its tight security and
capability that can help the companies to save their private information safe with this cloud
provider. However, a business might decide to against using AWS if it not operating on a
large scale. There are also limits in the Amazon EC2 where a second problem with this is
making the restrictive of resources in consideration with the region (Palumbo et al, 2021).
So, where if the business situated or its region can identify just how many resources it will
have access to.
Other Alternatives To AWS And Their Key Roles
Microsoft Azure is present as one of the strongest alternatives to AWS widely used for
building testing, deploying and managing applications. It is also one of the fastest growing
clouds among all its competitors where it presents several services within different
categories comprising AI, Blockchain, Developer Tools, Networking and its intelligence
cloud makes it one of the most smart and striking with having the most advanced and
greatest number of smart products and services (Dutta and Dutta, 2019). Azure also have a
different set of applications and framework as per the requirements of dissimilar clients
and customers. It also presents the top data centres internationally other than any service
provider and this makes a foray to the client mind to hold over Microsoft Azure cloud for
their business cloud integration and functionality. Big businesses capitalize heavily in cloud
processing options and therefore, it is necessary to integrate the best cloud computing
services.
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