Integrating the Business Cloud SoftArc Engineering

Question: Task 1. SoftArc Engineering, a local engineering company has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud computing in their daily operations. They have a series of staff that work on different projects in different parts of the country and are looking to provide them with office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files. What are the critical points, other than cost, that you need to consider in order to prepare your advice for this company? Your report to SoftArc should be about 2 pages. 2. SoftArc Engineering is considering using an IaaS provider to host some of its computing infrastructure. They have asked you to prepare a report for them that describes the difference between locally hosted computing infrastructure consisting of servers, storage and network the SoftArc data centre, and similar infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider. What are the critical points, other than cost, that an enterprise would need to consider in choosing to migrate services and storage from local hosted infrastructure to an IaaS service provider. Your report to SoftArc should be about 2 pages. 3. SoftArc engineering is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. SoftArc has deployed Microsoft Exchange 2012 in its data centre to provide email services to all 250 employees. It has also deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2013 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its employees. The SharePoint 2013 instance has been extensively customised to suit SoftArcs needs and also Runs Project Central, their Project Management tool as a separate application from within SharePoint. All employees have the Microsoft Office 2013 suite of office automation products installed on their respective desktops or laptops. SoftArc want you to report on: S 1. Should SoftArc move to a SaaS provider in order to provide email and office automation services for their employees? What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving to a SaaS provider for these services? 2. SoftArc would like to move its SharePoint 2013 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users in remote locations. What is the best model (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) for SoftArc to use for this service? Choose the model that you consider most appropriate for this service and discuss why the model you chose is the most appropriate for the SharePoint service. 3. Your report for this question should be no more than 3 pages. Rationale This assessment will cover the following objectives: Be able to compare and evaluate the ability of different Cloud Computing Architectures to meet a set of given business requirements; Be able to evaluate a set of business requirements to determine suitability for a Cloud Computing delivery model; Answer: 1: The author is a consultant for SoftArc engineering company and the firm needs some advice from the author regarding the usage of cloud computing in there organization. The company is looking to provide some benefits to their employees who are working from various parts of the country and on different projects. Most of the organization or enterprises are looking to implement cloud based management system and their services because they provide better usage of duty as well as their resources are exquisite. There are some significant and crucial aspects of cloud computing other than costing that needs to be addressed by the administration of SoftArc engineering company. The crucial points are discussed below that needs to be considered. Easy to collaborate: Most of the organization works in parallel and various cloud system services ensure that the enterprise gets huge success to teammates and communities to work altogether. Therefore, it assists by compromising and cooperating services among themselves. Hosting and developing applications: The cloud based management system needs to be implemented by SoftArc to ensure that they can develop and host server services to enhance or increase their work efficiency. The servers that are quite practical and handy need to be configured by the SoftArc software developers. Making employees more productive: The firm needs to be scalable and reliable and has access to estimate the cost and huge data files whereas the company design and production is spending much time on their job sites in overseas. From many years now the SoftArc is using their internal FTP servers to download the information or data and which is to be managed and maintained by the department of IT that is going to be terrible for the management of the company. Access to latest technologies: The best part of the cloud computing services is that they allow the employees to make sure that they can have access to the innovative and latest technology available. Moreover, there is no updating required for the applications and it's cost-effective because of no investment in the most recent front end technology. However, we can observe that there are various types of advantages of implementing and using the cloud computing services such as enterprise level backup, data security and protection, flexibility, cost effective, environmental factors. The company can reduce the use of office automation by implementing the cloud based solution (Curbera, 2013). Scalability and Reliability: The service of the cloud based system is well-managed, cost-effective and totally reliable in an organization infrastructure. The cloud based management services are much more stable than that of SoftArc controls. Whenever the agency or firm needs to adjust their information technology requirements than, the cloud services allows them to easily perform that task. 2: There are some various crucial points that need to be considered as far as IaaS service is concern before they migrate from their local hosted infrastructure. The main object of IaaS service is that they can be applied to both public and private infrastructure or they can be integrated as both. It is one kind of cloud computing solutions that assists the customized computing resources by and through the internet. It is more important to know the difference between similar kinds of infrastructure provided using IaaS or local computing hosted infrastructure that consists of networks, servers and storages. IaaS do provide some basic blocks and it also builds the virtual infrastructure to decrease the resources that are configured and created by using the existing computer hardware such as networking, arrays and servers (Manvi Shyam, 2014). It most benefited for desktop and storage, web hosting and disaster recovery management system as services. There are some critical points need to b e considered by SoftArc engineering company before they migrate to the IaaS model. The significant points are discussed below in detail. No point of failure: IaaS will work fine even if there is a failure in any data center. Due to its various hardware configurations it stays unchanged even if the network services get fails. Located independently: The cloud allows the access for IaaS services from any area or location until it meets all the protocol of internet connection and security measure. Security for the physical data center: It is rather important to have a proper security for the physical data center as it keeps away the threats or bad people from physically accessing the servers. Costing for style utility: The client needs to pay for the resources they have used. Scalability: IaaS provides us immediate available resources to enhance the growth easily. No huge investment in hardware: This will be a huge advantage for SoftArc as they dont have to pay huge amount of money for that hardware as the cloud solution disable the risk of hardware failure and their regular maintenance cost. 3 (a): The best option for SoftArc is that they must transfer to SaaS service vendors to provide the office automation and email services for their firm employees. The reason for doing this is that the organization can have a different way to build, buy and maintain the cost of information technology infrastructure. Using the internet the agency management can enhance to subscribe the mutual or common infrastructure and to sustain the low initial cost and to keep up the seamless implementation the body operates the high adoption (Goode et al., 2015). There are various advantages and disadvantages of moving to a SaaS provider for these services that is discussed below. Advantages Disadvantages Scalability and Accessibility. Switching Difficulty. Initially Low cost. Issues in Latency. The requirement of less maintains ace. Issues in Security. The requirement of less hardware. Dependent on the Internet. Figure 1: Advantages and Disadvantages of Moving to SaaS service. (Source: Created By Author) 3 (b): IaaS solution or service will be the best option for SoftArc engineering company is to choose from the other two solutions SaaS and PaaS for the enterprise and can be implemented in the SoftArc firm without any doubt in mind. The organization will be quickly using their existing systems and build it up as per their requirements or needs. It is more flexible and cost effective and it is rather focused on the business growth. It will be much benefited for the company to implement IaaS solution as the firm can quickly move their SharePoint to an existing cloud system that will enhance the usage flexibility from any remote location for the employee (Kavis, 2014). References: Curbera, F. (2013, September). Integrating the business cloud. In Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), 2013 17th IEEE International (pp. 103-103). IEEE. Goode, S., Lin, C., Tsai, J. C., Jiang, J. J. (2015). Rethinking the role of security in client satisfaction with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Decision Support Systems, 70, 73-85. Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). John Wiley Sons. Manvi, S. S., Shyam, G. K. (2014). Resource management for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in cloud computing: A survey. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 41, 424-440.