Case Study : Evaluating Potential Cloud Partnerships

As previously mentioned, cloud computing has recently emerged as a pioneering model for hosting and distributing services over the Internet. Actually, the model entails sharing resources on a huge scale through a value effective and location independent process. While the resources on the cloud are deployed by the seller, they are utilized by the consumer (Belamkar, 2014). Cloud computing is very beneficial to organizations and companies because it is engaging to business organizations

After reading many articles about Cloud Computing I saw the bright future for these types of cloud services. Aside from educating myself on this topic I feel that this could be beneficial to my fellow Computer Technology peers to address their client or employers cloud needs as well as people who are going to start a business and are looking at the options available to address their companies demands.

When user has to use more than one infrastructure user need to pay more money for each cloud to use the facilities which makes the application expensive. [3]

Business owners use three types of cloud service, public, private, and hybrid these clouds store their data and provide them with services. The benefits of these clouds are endless, additionally, they saves businesses time and money, promoting innovation, enhancing productivity, and improving communication while cloud hosting accelerate information sharing, like email, application hosting, web-based phone, and data storage (Griffith, 2013).

The top Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) in our market are various. Most of them have their special advantages for surviving in fierce business competitions. Some may have advantages on mobile app, some may have advantages on languages, customer help and support services or prices, or others may pay more attention on security protection and their reputation improvements. In this assignment, I picked up four top CSPs with comparisons of their functionality, cost, security, mobile access and customer support services. The four CSPs are Apple iCloud, Google, OpenDrive, and Amazon.

As businesses have noticed over the last decade the initial cost of storage and bandwidth continue to diminish rapidly. As a result the offerings of Cloud-based services have become more and more attractive to businesses which are seeking to reduce their software licensing costs. It is now coming into the light that the Cloud provides businesses with cost-effective alternatives, organizations need to be cautious and not fall into the ‘all Cloud’ solution trap. We all know that there is no one-model-fits-all and rather than jumping out of the pan and into the fire into the Cloud, Organizations should investigate and plan how they can maximize the benefits of their existing set-up

There are many issues with current cloud and their architectures. Some of them are users are often tied with one cloud provider, computing components are tightly coupled, lack of SLA supports, lack of Multi-tenancy supports, Lack of Flexibility for User Interface. [4]

Cloud services can make huge competitive advantages to the enterprise companies, if the applications are correctly architected to satisfy the business requirements. Some enterprises don’t fully understand while embracing new technologies, as they rush into development mode and forgo the necessary architecture and design changes needed in their IT landscape. Sometimes they also have unrealistic expectations like

The advances in information and communication technologies have paved way to cloud computing, which is becoming one of the essential social infrastructures. It is a new paradigm for storing data and accessing information and applications which are offered as on-demand services over the Internet infrastructure. It provides new possibilities for business firms as well as governments. In particular, organizations that adopt cloud computing services are expected to gain cost benefits from reduced up-front IT investment, maintenance and lower energy cost (Bose and Luo, 2011); while for the industry as whole, it will benefit from increasing economies of scale and reduction of unutilized capacity (Haag and Eckhardt, 2014). Further cloud computing offers opportunities for innovation realized through lowering entry and expansion cost for firms, especially small and medium enterprises; access high quality services, and fast deployment of product and services. Additional benefits include productivity gains particularly resources efficiency, flexibility and on-demand scalability (Armbrust et al. 2010) as firms concentrate on their core business while accessing high IT quality services from the cloud vendors.

There are numerous issues with current cloud and their architectures. Some of them are clients are regularly tied with one cloud supplier, registering parts are firmly coupled, absence of SLA backings, absence of Multi-occupancy backings, Lack of Flexibility for User Interface. [4]

The sudden emergence of cloud storage has taken over organizations by storm. A recent study that was conducted, concluded that, the number of organizations using cloud storage has almost doubled in the last few years alone. And in addition, the public cloud service market will exceed $244 billion by 2017 (Baiju, 2014). Using the cloud can provide many competitive advantages for a business. This includes; usability, bandwidth, disaster recovery, and cost savings.

Today’s world of cloud computing is complex. The majority of users have moved beyond initial cloud adoption into a multi-cloud environment. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Ostrato found that almost two out of three (65%) businesses report implementing more than one cloud service in their IT departments. Of these respondents, 88% are planning on increasing their usage of cloud services during the next twelve months.

A few surveys from RightScale (2015) state of the cloud report has demonstrated the significance of cloud computing which demonstrates that 93% of organizations reviewed are running applications or experimenting in cloud computing. (Rightscale, 2015)

For companies considering whether or not to use cloud computing versus staying with or building their own data centre, there are three primary factors affecting their decision: their business needs,

The use of cloud computing, in which information is being stored and shared across the world, is growing at a rapid pace. To further help conceptualize this process, the cloud has also been described as something similar to a shared, pay-as-you-use public utility supplying water to a community.