Cloud Computing Of The Upstream Oil & Gas Industry : A Proposed Way Forward

In statement, Alijabre writes “Cloud Computing can help business shift their focus to developing god business applications that will bring true business value.” To prove his point Alijabre, uses statistical data gathered from one of big leading providers in Cloud Services. “Although cloud computing has been recognized as a way to improve business, not all businesses are the same. So, is cloud computing for all businesses or is it more beneficial for a certain type of business with certain infrastructure already in place?” To make his argument, Alijabre uses Amazon Cloud Service to give us a better idea the use of cloud computing in business, and what can they do to improve it. Amazon has been one of the best providers of cloud services to individuals or to small businesses. “Also, it has more than 79 million active customer accounts around the world, along with around one and a half million active seller accounts.” Undoubtedly, Amazon is the leading source in providing cloud services. Amazon makes it easier for the consumers to access their data online, only thing needed

This research paper tackles the issues that faces Cloud Computing today and gives the experts and industry’s point of view on the matter. The aspects explored are the significant industry questions that have risen about the use of Cloud Computing, business value, organization impact, adaptability, limitations, initial cost of implementation, and the severe business security risks

Ten years ago business professionals were grappling with the decision of whether to implement cloud computing into their organizations. Today, we no longer have the luxury of “If” we will embrace the new technology but rather “How” we will make it as safe as possible.

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

In 2008, Cloud computing was being touted as the next big thing in computing (Bajarin, 2008); just 6 years later in 2014, a Eurostat news release claimed that Cloud computing services are used by one out of every five enterprises in the European Union (Bourgeais, 2014), which indicates a subtle but not overwhelming rate of adoption. According to a study by the Cloud Industry Forum, 82% of business owners’ main concern they have when making a decision to migrate to cloud-based services is data security; with 69% also stating that data privacy is another concern of theirs (Cloud Industry Forum, 2013). The aforementioned statistics straightaway show where the concerns lie when it comes to users migrating over to the cloud,

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.

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

Cloud based computing can be considered as an upcoming computing paradigm or a business model allowing organizations and businesses to Incorporate IT capabilities without having to Invest heavily upfront to set up the IT infrastructure. It is incontrovertible that the capabilities and the advantages provided by cloud based services can greatly benefit businesses and organizations around the globe, but there remain some unresolved issues with respect to cloud based systems that can hinder

The world is moving from manufacturing to more service-oriented day after a day. According to a survey of the U.S. economy conducted in 2010, 15% of the U.S. economy is driven by manufacturing, 5% in agriculture and other areas, and the remaining 80% is related to the service industry (Hwang & Dongarra 2013). Also, based on IDC, International Data Corporation, the cloud service market reached $17.4 billion globally in 2009 and is predicted to grow to more than $45 billion by the end of 2015. Cloud Computing can be explained as the delivery of computing resources over the Internet and is generally categorized under three layer: IaaS- Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS- Platform as a Service, and SaaS- Software as a Service (McKay, 2011).

Cloud computing can offer businesses many advantages. However, there are many disadvantages as well. For instance, increased convenience may come at the cost of diminished security. Scrutinizing these tradeoffs is necessary for determining whether or not to utilize this technology.

Customers of cloud computing have shown their concerns about the incompatibility of switching their data from one cloud provider to another while cloud provider are ready to offer all their available services and resources to the cloud customers [3]. Particularly, the offered services are different for each a cloud provider where it comes up the problem of heterogeneity of services. Each provider develops its own services, solutions, and even some of them create a new APIs for their services. Consequently, the cloud customers have being limited to one specific cloud’s provider service format. According to [4], there are two consequences of this issue as (1) it gives the cloud provider the full power of controlling the market; (2) it may impact the consumer choices for a product. However, this issue may limit cloud computing environment growth by restricting the cloud services choices since the data will be kept locked-in in cloud computing bubble.

The world, as a whole, is changing. It is true that some sections of the world are remaining primitive in terms of industrialization, but the general population is a progressive one. There are incredible advancements being made in the industries of transportation, communications, aerospace and defense, as well as almost every industry related to the culture of society. As these advancements progress and companies innovate, the demand for different products changes. For example, the demand for DVDs today is no where near what it once was. In today’s society, there is a huge demand for technology based products. Due to this increased demand for technology, there has been an impressive amount of innovation on how technology is both used and sold. The largest of these innovative movements has been the movement towards cloud computing. In about as basic of a definition there is, The Cloud is simply a way to store data online. Instead of saving something to a hard drive, it can be saved to The Cloud. As one of The Cloud’s many advantages, this allows files to be accessed from any device at any location. However, it also has some disadvantages. This is arguably the most relevant issue in the business world today, which is why the sources below will help to analyze the benefits of cloud computing versus the costs of it.

Just as mitigating risks can affect the IT practices of a company, the place where a business stores its data holds major significance in an era in which the majority of work is done online. A business has two main options: it can store its data in a data center or in a cloud. A data center is an onsite hardware that stores a business’ information on a local network. On the other hand, a cloud is an off-site location where a service provider owns and manages infrastructure with cloud users, accessing slices of shared hardware resources via the Internet . Each of these options serve different purposes and benefit or disadvantage a company in different ways. For example, a data center is more suitable for companies that run many applications; however, it has a limited

Simply put, cloud technology means sharing resources, information, and software over a network such as the internet as opposed to using a personal computer, server, or other computer hard drive. It is delivered as a service rather than a product like traditional computing. The different services are called Software as a Service or “SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service “LaaS”, Computing as a Service “CaaS”, and Platform as a Service “PaaS”. Many people believe that moving to the cloud is the future of IT and several businesses already rely on the cloud for all of their technology needs. We are going to look into how cloud computing works, what makes it successful and what are some issues that may arise from moving away from traditional

While cloud computing is rapidly evolving along with its increasing adoption, it has many challenges to overcome to be a general purpose utility suitable for all. Some of the major challenges that prevent businesses from moving to the cloud includes security and privacy risks, service availability and reliability concerns and a lack of standards between cloud providers (Elena & Johnson 2015). Other major concerns are Government Regulations, Exit Strategies and International Data Privacy (Walker 2012). The aim of this