The Types Of Service Models

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Joao

Contents

Table of Figures

Abstract

Cloud computing delivers hosted services over the internet. It is becoming more popular as time progresses although the technology is still being improved. I will consider the future aspects involved with the use of cloud computing within a business environment. Also I will write about the advantages, disadvantages, risks involved and different opportunities that different businesses will fortune from this service. I will also try to find different cloud solutions that will help different kind of businesses decide which one is better fit. I then shall use a questionnaire and reflect on the data gathered to aid me to find different recommendations for a business to use cloud computing.

Introduction

Aims and Objectives

This project is aimed to gather beneficial and possible detrimental information on cloud computing and use that information to examine different types of cloud solutions that is best fit for a businesses use. Then assess all of the information collected and recommend why a business should use the cloud.

Objectives:

Investigate the benefits of using the cloud in a business

Look at into how cloud computing will impact a business

Examine different cloud solutions for a business

Look into different companies that use cloud computing

Suggest key factors of why the cloud will be the future for companies to use

Asses the risks of using the cloud

Design a questionnaire

Collect data from questionnaire

Evaluate the data gathered from the questionnaire

Produce a report of the project, evaluating the findings and produce a set of recommendations for the use cloud computing in a business.

Research Methodology

1.4.1 Introduction

From the previous section, I talked about the aims and the objectives for this project. However, some of those objectives have obstacles such as investigating the benefits of using the cloud in a business and designing a questionnaire. The research methodology plan will help me achieve these objectives.

1.4.2 Research Methodology Summary

1.4.2.1 Hypothesis

The cloud has been around for a while, as I previously said in the history of cloud computing section, and it’s becoming better as time progresses. Businesses with this sort of technology can vastly improve their efficiency, such like the company Citrix (Previously said in type of cloud mode chapter 1.1.1), which uses a private cloud model in their business which their employees can work from home. Now to the question, is cloud computing useful in a business environment?

1.4.2.2 Brief Introduction

In this section, I will define what my research strategy will include. This project is based on a deductive research approach. I will also use the Quantitative approach as it suits the style of my data collection. Primary and secondary data will be used in my research since I will be using a questionnaire as primary data and different sources i.e. books, news articles, PDFs etc.

1.4.3 Research Methodology

The reason that my project is based on a deductive approach is because it’s based on a theory where I can narrow that down into a precise hypothesis. This then leads me to collect data and analyse those findings to address my hypothesis, this is to confirm if it’s true or not. I chose a quantitative approach for this project because it will test my hypothesis, to see if cloud computing is useful in a business environment.

I shall collect this data through the use of secondary and primary data. I will design a questionnaire with some help with (Brace, I., 2004.). This online eBook will help me design my questionnaire and help me analyse the statistical data to give an effective evaluation. A small sample of people will make it easier to analyse the data faster than using a large sample. I will also do a literature research that will include a variety of books, news articles and other statistical information for my personal research. These types of sources are easily assessable over the internet or the library. Doing a literature research over the internet is generally faster.

The participants for this questionnaire are people who have knowledge in the field of cloud computing because I want the answers to be definite. This will make it easier for me to analyse the data and confidently evaluate it.

Business and the Cloud

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1 What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2011). Cloud computing gives the ability to run applications and access data using the internet from a PC or a mobile device. No local data or software is required to run these applications, everything is online.

Figure : Cloud Computing Deployment Model (Esri, 2010) [2]

2.1.2 Types of Cloud Models

This figure represents a hybrid cloud computing environment where there is at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. For example, (Rouse, M, 2010) said that "an organisation like Amazon, might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities." 

Public cloud is the type of cloud that everyone pictures it to be. It is based on the standard model of cloud computing in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet. Public cloud services may be free or offered on a pay-per-usage model. (Rouse, M, 2009) For example, Dropbox use cloud based storage (which uses Amazons simple storage service (S3) (Dropbox, 2013)), and is accessible to everyone anytime through a PC or a mobile device, as long as you have an active internet connection.

Private cloud, also known as internal cloud computing, provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Private cloud has increased data security where the user and the business are in control of the data. A business who uses this type of cloud model is Citrix, which provides cloud access from the business to the user with encryption.

2.1.2 Types of Service Models

A cloud service is a type of resource that is provided over the internet. (Rouse, M, 2011). There are three common cloud type services, these are: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Software as a Service (SaaS) – is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. (Rouse, M, 2010)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones. (Rouse, M, 2010)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis. (Rouse, M, 2010)

History of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been around since the time before the internet was even created.

It all started in 1960 where John Mcarthy introduced the cloud computing concept. Then Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues created a graphical user interface in 1964 that was used for windows with a mouse, and still to this day we still use this concept. According to (Sales Force, 2012), Joseph Licklider was one of the biggest contributors to the history of cloud computing. He spent the 1960s developing ARPANET. ARPANET was created in 1969 and it was then turned into the internet in 1971. From when ARPANET was first transformed into the internet 2 major companies were founded during the 70s up until the 90s. These companies take a major part in cloud computing as of today, such as Apples iCloud service (Apple, 2013) that allows the user to run applications, store their data over the internet using your mobile device or PC/MAC.

CERN (Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire) release the World Wide Web back in 1991 to the general public (Gribble, C., 2009). This then made other companies produce web browsers, where the first widely used browser Mosiac was created back in 1993. The programming team that created Mosiac then created Netscape, the first commercial web browser, this browser was dominant until 1999 where internet explorer took the lead (Living Internet, 200- ).

In 1995, companies Amazon and eBay were founded. Proceeding to 1999, salesforce.com was launched where they ran applications from their website, knows as cloud computing.

In the year 2000, the Dot-com bubble ‘burst’ (stock market crash) (Beattie, A., 200- ) which lead to other companies such as Amazon to improve on their data centres to provide cloud computing to outside customers. As the years went by, in 2002, Amazon released their Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Amazon, 2002) which provides services to the customer. The services they provided, that were released in 2006, were Amazon EC2, a cloud computing platform and Amazon S3, also known as simple storage service, in other words, an online storage service for others to use (MacManus, R., 2006).

Moving onto 2007, salesforce.com launched force.com which is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to create and deploy applications for social enterprise (salesforce.com, 200-.). In 2009 Google released Google apps, this allowed people to create, edit and store documents entirely in the cloud.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Taking note from (Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., Ghalsasi, A., 2011.), the author includes many advantages that cloud computing offers. These are:

The capital cost of starting a new business is substantially lowered. This is because newer business can use other services that are at their disposal, such as Amazons web services (Amazon, 2002) and not buy newer equipment, thus reducing capital cost. Also (Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., Ghalsasi, A., 2011, p77.) says that "some cloud computing providers are using the advantages of a cloud platform to enable IT services in countries that would have traditionally lacked the resources for widespread deployment of IT services.", here we have a win-win situation here, companies that lack resources to deploy their IT services are able to use other companies cloud platforms to aid in their success.

Cloud computing can be accessed immediately.

It can provide an almost immediate access to hardware resources, with no upfront capital investments for users, leading to a faster time to market in many businesses. Treating IT as an operational expense (in industry-speak, employing an ‘Op-ex’ as opposed to a‘Cap-ex’ model) also helps in dramatically reducing the upfront costs in corporate computing. For example, many of the promising new Internet start-ups like 37 Signals, Jungle Disk, Gigavox, SmugMug and others were realized with investments in information technology that are orders of magnitude lesser than that required just a few years ago. The cloud becomes an adaptive infrastructure that can be shared by different end users, each of whom might use it in very different ways. The users are completely separated from each other, and the flexibility of the infrastructure allows for computing loads to be balanced on the fly as more users join the system (the process of setting up the infrastructure has become so standardized that adding computing capacity has become almost as simple as adding building blocks to an existing grid). The beauty of the arrangement is that as the number of users goes up, the demand load on the system gets more balanced in a stochastic sense, even as its economies of scale expand.

Cloud computing can lower IT barriers to innovation, as can be witnessed from the many promising start-ups, from the ubiquitous online applications such as Facebook and YouTube to the more focused applications like TripIt (for managing one's travel) or Mint(for managing one's personal finances).

Cloud computing makes it easier for enterprises to scale their services – which are increasingly reliant on accurate information – according to client demand. Since the computing resources are managed through software, they can be deployed very fast as new requirements arise. In fact, the goal of cloud computing is to scale resources up or down dynamically through software APIs depending on client load with minimal service provider interaction.

Cloud computing also makes possible new classes of applications and delivers services that were not possible before. Examples include (a) mobile interactive applications that are location-, environment- and context-aware and that respond in real time to information provided by human users, nonhuman sensors (e.g. humidity and stress sensors within a shipping container) or even from independent information services (e.g. worldwide weather data)4; (b) parallel batch processing, that allows users to take advantage of huge amounts of processing power to analyse terabytes of data for relatively small periods of time, while programming abstractions like Google's MapReduce or its open source counterpart Hadoop makes the complex process of parallel execution of an application over hundreds of servers transparent to programmers; (c) business analytics that can use the vast amount of computer resources to understand customers, buying habits, supply chains and so on from voluminous amounts of data; and (d) extensions of compute-intensive desktop applications that can offload the data crunching to the cloud leaving only the rendering of the processed data at the front-end, with the availability of network bandwidth reducing the latency involved." (Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., Ghalsasi, A., 2011, p77.)

2.4 Impact on Businesses

References

[1] National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2011. The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing [PDF] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf [Assessed on 8 February 2013]

[2] Esri, 2010. Cloud Computing Deployment Model, [Online] Available at: http://www.esri.com/news/arcwatch/0110/graphics/feature4-lg.jpg [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[3] Rouse, M, 2010. Definition hybrid cloud. [Online] June. Available at: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/hybrid-cloud [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[4] Rouse, M, 2009. Definition public cloud. [Online] May. Available at: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/public-cloud [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[5] Dropbox, 2013. Where does Dropbox store everyone's data? [Online] Available at: https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[6] Rouse, M, 2011. Definition cloud services. [Online] September. Available at: http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-services [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[7] Rouse, M, 2010. Definition Software as a Service (SaaS). [Online] August. Available at: http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/definition/Software-as-a-Service [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[8] Rouse, M, 2010. DefinitionPlatform as a Service (PaaS). [Online] August. Available at: http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/definition/Platform-as-a-Service-PaaS [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[9] Rouse, M, 2010. Definition Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). [Online] August. Available at: http://searchcloudprovider.techtarget.com/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS [Assessed on 1st March 2013]

[10] Sales Force, 2012. A complete history of cloud computing. [Online] Available at: http://www.salesforce.com/uk/socialsuccess/cloud-computing/the-complete-history-of-cloud-computing.jsp [Assessed on 5th March 2013]

[11] Apple, 2013. iCloud. [Online] Available at: http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/ [Assessed on 5ht March 2013]

[12] Gribble, C., 2009. History of the Web Beginning at CERN. [Online] Available at: http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.html [Assessed on 5th March 2013]

[13] Living Internet, 200-. Web Browser History. [Online] Available at: http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm [Assessed on 5th March 2013]

[14] Beattie, A., 200-. Market Crashes: The Dotcom Crash. [Online] Available at: http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes8.asp#axzz2Mt2x644G [Assessed on 7th March 2013]

[15] Amazon, 2002. Amazon.com Launches Web Services; Developers Can Now Incorporate Amazon.com Content and Features into Their Own Web Sites; Extends ''Welcome Mat'' for Developers. [Press Release] Jul 16 2002. Available at: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=503034&highlight= [Assessed on 7th March 2013]

[16] MacManus, R., 2006. Amazon Launches Elastic Compute Cloud. Readwrite. [Online] August 23rd. Available at: http://readwrite.com/2006/08/23/amazon_ec2 [Assessed on 7th March 2013]

[17] Salesforce.com, 200-. What is force.com? [Online] Available at: http://www.force.com/why-force.jsp [Assessed on 5th March 2013]

[18] Brace, I., 2004. Questionnaire design: how to plan, structure and write survey material for effective market research. EBooks Corporation [Online]. Available at: http://www.shu.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=242857&userid=bO8VqKDRcylm74Nih6NRCDhHXfo%3d&tstamp=1321266101&id=59a76beec7b297f187453646081d0271bd341e02 [Assessed on 20th February 2013]

[19] Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., Ghalsasi, A., 2011. Decision Support Systems: Cloud computing — The business perspective, 51, pp.176-189