Case Study : Model Driven Operations Essay

With each successive generation of computing technologies, the balance of computing power and economics shifts farther to the side of the line-of-business user, away from the centralized Information Technologies (IT) systems departments that have ruled companies for decades. IT Departments and those who lead them, the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who have had exceptional power of the demand and supply of IT resources, are actively being challenged today by the shift towards abundant supply of computing power cloud computing makes available (Middleton, 2012).

Distributed computing has turned into a massive market. In a 2016 report, investigators at Gartner anticipated that the move to the cloud will influence more than $1 trillion in IT spending throughout the following five years. "Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying noteworthy in a snappy paced world," said Ed Anderson, investigate VP at Gartner. "The market for cloud organizations has created to such an extent, to the point that it is as of now an extraordinary level of total IT spending, making another period of new organizations and 'considered in the cloud' providers." In their hurry to take part in this tremendous market, sellers have rushed to tout cloud triumphs. Their locales are stacked with logical examinations

IT organizations have the dilemma of operating essential existing infrastructure into the foreseeable future, while at the same time building a team and processes to manage cloud based environments.

The Cloud Computing is one of the fastest growing technology that attracts researchers to add and improve its services [1][7]. Organizations benefit from this technology by replacing traditional IT hardware and data centers with remote, on-demand paid hardware and software services, that are configured for their particular needs, managed and hosted by the organization users or even a third party. This increases the organization’s flexibility and efficiency, without the need to have a dedicated IT staff or owning special hardware equipment or software licenses.

With the current state of the economy, I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about innovation, service design, cloud computing and disruption in general. At no point in my career has it become more apparent that we are in the middle of large paradigm shift. The recent economic events have only highlighted the importance to look for new ways of delivering IT Services in a cost effective, high value and timely manner.

Whether it’s called Cloud Computing or On-demand Computing, Software as a Service, or the Internet as Platform, the common element is a shift in the geography of computation. When you create a spreadsheet with the Google Docs service, major components of the software reside on unseen computers, whereabouts unknown, possibly scattered across continents. This affects all levels of the computational ecosystem, from casual user to software developer, IT manager, even hardware manufacturer. Recently, a lot of vendors have started talking about “cloud computing” in their marketing materials. Citing a research published by Merrill Lynch entitled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake,” Merrill Lynch has estimated a $160- billion addressable market opportunity, including $95- billion in business and productivity applications, and another $65-billion in online advertising for Cloud Computing. But the main question is whether the users are ready to give up using services on their local machines and shift to the Cloud since shifting to cloud computing has both advantages and disadvantages for all possible users; nevertheless, they may have different level of importance for different users

Legacy systems tend to provide a significant value for companies. This is due to the fact that they still meet user needs and are capable of capturing vital business logic. The cost of replacing these legacy systems with a system designed completely from scratch is much too high, but reusing a legacy system can be equally difficult due to the fact that legacy system reuse comes with its own set of obstacles like platform, documentation, and architecture issues. Cloud Computing has come along and it provides the promise of significantly lower costs with enhanced performance capabilities

As we begin to look at the state of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years. Gartner estimates show the current offerings for SaaS and Cloud services are showing strong and consistent growth, however this estimate also shows that

The data center industry is under a major transition. Big Software, IoT (Internet of Things), and Big Data are changing how operators must architect and deploy data center technologies. Traditional scale-up models of delivering monolithic software on big machines is being replaced by scale-out solutions that are delivered on disparate cloud services running on many machines and environments. This shift has forced data center operators to turn to the next generation of solutions that will improve operational efficiency while reducing costs. While it is difficult to predict which technologies will be in place in the coming years, there is no doubt organizations are looking to scale-out solutions as the future of IT operations and infrastructure deployments.

Cloud computing has drastically reordered the economics of how every size and type of business uses software. For the large enterprise there is no longer the need to go through an extensive capital expense (CAPEX) budgeting process, often involving the board of directors of a business (Aljabre, 2012). Cloud computing software is often pad for through operating expense (OPEX) budgets, which shifts the control of its budgeting to the line-of-business managers or those managers and executives responsible for a given business unit. This dynamic alone has completely reordered the enterprise software market, as cloud-based applications can often be modified significantly faster than on-premise applications (Lin, Chen, 2012). As a result of this flexibility, enterprises, medium-size and small businesses are all relying on cloud-based applications to automate those process areas that had been expensive and

This paper deals with two such enterprises that had the built-in resources to face scalability and also compares the technologies that they used to scale their business. Applications and systems have adapted and accommodated for the traffic of the millions in the heat of the moment, the moment being Cloud and its nuances.

The chapter illustrates how different fields are leveraging from the Cloud Computing benefits in its different service models and overcoming the drawbacks of the classical IT solutions.

As indicated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Cloud computing is a model for empowering convenient, on-demand network access to a mutual pool of configurable computing resources, for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services that can be quickly provisioned and discharged with insignificant administration effort or service provider interaction [1]. In 1966, D. F. Parkhil predicted in his book “The challenge of the Computing Utility” that computing power would one day be available to the public in a similar way as water and electricity. Today, as indicated by the industry, Cloud computing is perceived as the fifth public resource or utility that follows after the commonly known public utilities, namely: water, electricity, gas, and telephony [2]. Many firms, both big and small have often preferred to shift the concerns of upgrades, maintenance and configuration of software back to its developers without the need for a constant on-site consultant presence. Today, with the inception of the Cloud computing paradigm, many firms have found relative answers to their quest for cost efficient computing. Firms can now have common access to the Cloud’s configurable computing resources across the Internet independently without reference to the seemingly hidden hosting infrastructure. This infrastructure comprise data centers that are maintained and monitored by resource providers all the time. Think of accessing a software by just a

This report proposes a strategic E-business initiative to adopt cloud computing to host the IT infrastructure of the company. The enterprises today are facing the pressures to consolidate their IT infrastructure and at the same time improve the business agility. Also with the dynamic business environments there is a constant need to innovate to higher standards. Cloud computing is the way forward to a convenient and dynamic shared pool of customisable computing resources. It delivers rapid results with minimal provisioning.

HEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT “plugging into the IT cloud,” they generally have something very simple in mind— browser access to an application hosted on the Web. Cloud computing is certainly that, but it’s also much more. What follows is the longer, more detailed explanation. With so much happening in the technology industry around cloud computing, InformationWeek set out to define the megatrend in a way that helps IT professionals not only understand the nuances, but also make informed decisions about when and where to use cloud services in lieu of on-premises software and systems. Cloud