CLOUD COMPUTING

1: INTRODUCTION Cloud computing is the use of computing resources i.e. hardware and software that are delivered as o service over a network (internet). The name comes from the common use of the cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction used for the complex infrastructure it contains in the system diagrams. Cloud computing is entrusts remote services with a users data, software and computation. End users access the application with a light weight browser or a mobile application while the business users access it through servers at a remote location. The promise of the cloud computing is to deliver all the functionality of the existing information technology services even as it dramatically reduces the upfront costs of computing that deter many organizations from deploying many cutting-edge IT services. All such promise has led to lofty expectations as the Gartner Research expects cloud computing to be a $150 billion business by 2014, and according to AMI partners small and medium business are expected to spend over $100 billion on cloud computing by 2014. The impetus for change right now is seen predominantly from a cost perspective, as organizations increasingly discover that their substantial capital investment in information technology is often grossly underutilized. One recent survey of six corporate data centers found that most of the servers were using just 10-30% of their available computing power, while desktop computers have an average capacity utilization of less than 5%.

A: CHARACTERISTICS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. Agility- improves with users ability to re-provision technological infrastructure resources. Application programming interface(API)- accessibility to software that enable machines to interact with cloud software in a traditional way Cost- that is claimed to be reduced Device and location independence- enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location Virtualization- sharing and utilization is increased. Application can easily be migrated from one physical server to another Multitenancy - sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users. Reliability- makes well designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.

VIII. IX. X.

Performance- is monitored and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface. Security- is improved due to centralization of data. Maintenance- of cloud computing applications is easier as they do not need to be installed on each users computer and can be accessed from different places

B. SERRVICE MODELS I. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) II. Platform as a service (PaaS) III. Software as a service (SaaS) IV. Network as a service (NaaS)

2. OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING FOR THE MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM There are many challenges and obstacles to cloud computing. Each challenge described in the following paras is paired with an opportunity. The fact is that each challenge is an opportunity in itself. I. Availability of a Service: Organizations worry about whether utility computing services will have adequate availability, and this make some wary of cloud computing. Ironically, existing SaaS products have set a high standard in this regard. Google search is the effective dial tone of the internet: if people went to Google for search and it wasnt available, they would think that the internet was down. Users expect the similar availability from the new services, which is hard to do. The high-availability computing community has long followed the mantra no single source of failure, yet the management of a cloud computing service by a single company is in fact a single point of failure. Even if the company has multiple datacenters in different geographic regions using different network providers, it may have common software infrastructure and accounting systems, or the company may even go out of business. Large customers will be reluctant to migrate to cloud computing without a business continuity strategy for such situations. Criminals threaten to cut of the SaaS providers by making their services unavailable, extorting $10,000 to $50.000 payments to prevent the launch a DdoS attack. As with elasticity, cloud computing shifts the attack target from the SaaS provider to the utility computing provider, who can more readily absorb it and is also likely to have already DdoS protection as a core competency.

II.

Data Lock-in Software stacks have improved interoperability among platforms, but the APIs for Cloud Computing itself are still essentially proprietary, or at least have not been the subject of active standardization. Thus, customers cannot easily extract their data and programs from one site to run on another. Concern about the difcult of extracting data from the cloud is preventing some organizations from adopting Cloud Computing. Customer lock-in may be attractive to Cloud Computing providers, but Cloud Computing users are vulnerable to price increases to reliability problems, or even to providers going out of business. There are are two arguments to allay this fear: First, the quality of a service matters as well as the price, so customers will not necessarily jump to the lowest cost service. Some Internet Service Providers today cost a factor of ten more than others because they are more dependable and offer extra services to improve usability. Second, in addition to mitigating data lock-in concerns, standardization of APIs enables a new usage model in which the same software infrastructure can be used in a Private Cloud and in a Public Cloud. 9 Such an option could enable Surge Computing, in which the public Cloud is used to capture the extra tasks that cannot be easily run in the datacenter (or private cloud) due to temporarily heavy workloads.

III.

Data confidentiality and Auditability Current cloud offerings are essentially public (rather than private) networks, exposing the system to more attacks. There are also requirements for auditability, in the sense of Sarbanes-Oxley and Health and Human Services Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that must be provided for corporate data to be moved to the cloud. Cloud Computing gives SaaS providers and SaaS users greater freedom to place their storage. For example, Amazon provides S3 services located physically in the United States and in Europe, allowing providers to keep data in whichever they choose. With AWS regions, a simple configuration change avoids the need to find and negotiate with a hosting provider overseas.

IV.

Data transfer Bottleneck Applications continue to become more data-intensive. If we assume applications may be pulled apart across the boundaries of clouds, this may

complicate data placement and transport. At $100 to $150 per terabyte transferred, these costs can quickly add up, making data transfer costs an important issue. Cloud users and cloud providers have to think about the implications of placement and traffic at every level of the system if they want to minimize costs. This kind of reasoning can be seen in Amazons development of their new Cloudfront services. One opportunity to overcome the high cost of Internet transfers is to ship disks. Jim Gray found that the cheapest way to send a lot of data is to physically send disks or even whole computers via overnight delivery services. Although there are no guarantees from the manufacturers of disks or computers that you can reliably ship data that way, he experienced only one failure in about 400 attempts. Another, more radical opportunity is to try to reduce the cost of WAN bandwidth more quickly.

V.

Scale able Storage Three properties are identified whose combination gives Cloud Computing its appeal: short-term usage, no up-front cost, and infinite capacity on-demand. While its straightforward what this means when applied to computation, its less obvious how to apply it to persistent storage. The opportunity, which is still an open research problem, is to create a storage system would not only meet these needs but combine them with the cloud advantages of scaling arbitrarily up and down on-demand, as well as meeting programmer expectations in regard to resource management for scalability, data durability, and high availability.

VI.

Bugs in Large Scale-Distributed System One of the difficult challenges in Cloud Computing is removing errors in these very large scale distributed systems. A common occurrence is that these bugs cannot be reproduced in smaller configuration, so the debugging must occur at scale in the production datacenters. One opportunity may be the reliance on virtual machines in Cloud Computing.

VII.

Scaling quickly Pay-as-you-go certainly applies to storage and to network bandwidth, both of which count bytes used. Computation is slightly different, depending on the

virtualization level. Google AppEngine automatically scales in response to load increases and decreases, and users are charged by the cycles used. AWS charges by the hour for the number of instances you occupy, even if your machine is idle. VIII. Reputation Fate Sharing Reputations do not virtualize well. One customers bad behavior can affect the reputation of the cloud as a whole. An opportunity would be to create reputation-guarding services similar to the trusted email services currently offered to services hosted on smaller ISPs, which experience a microcosm of this problem.

3. IMPACTS OF CLOUD COMPUTING ON ECONOMIC, TECHNICAL AND SECIRITY TERMS

I.

Impacts on Economics The current economic climate means that being ahead of the curve with innovative hosting strategies is more important than ever for business success and cost efficiency. This report, undertaken by the Manchester Business School in partnership with Rackspace, evaluated how UK businesses are using the cloud, and what the economic benefits of doing so are. The findings were based upon surveys of 1300 companies, and showed that: I. II. III. Cloud computing saves money Cloud computing helps increase competitiveness Cloud computing offers exciting possibilities for businesses of all sizes

A. Cloud Computing means greater profitability Most of the companies we spoke to (85%) had increased their profits by up to 50%. This was particularly the case in the US, with almost one third noting an increase in profits of between 10% and 25%, and a further 19% noting an increase of between 25% and 50% in profits which they said was directly attributable to their cloud computing investments. B. Cloud means more Focus on Strategy and Innovation

The biggest and quickest win for businesses is on IT spend. Big companies make the biggest savings. Nearly a quarter of those we spoke (23%) to they were saving between 500,000 and 4 million a year.

C. Cloud means savings on office costs.

Cloud computing means that employees can work remotely. Nearly three quarters (71%) of the companies we spoke to said they had been able to cut their spending on offices. D. Cloud Frees up cash to be Re-invested in the Business What do businesses spend that saved money on? Almost half (48%) of companies said they plough cash into product and service innovation, while almost as many said they put the savings into product or service offering. More than a third (38%) spend the cash theyve saved on boosting sales efforts and almost one third (35%) in marketing. E. Cloud helps Small Businesses think Big 58% of SMEs agreed that cloud helps small business punch above their weight so that they can compete with bigger companies. 52% of large enterprises agree, too.

II.

Security Impacts

In the last few years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry. Now, recession-hit companies are increasingly realizing that simply by tapping into the cloud they can gain fast access to best-of-breed business applications or drastically boost their infrastructure resources, all at negligible cost. But as more and more information on individuals and companies is placed in the cloud, concerns are beginning to grow about just how safe an environment it is.

A.

Every breached security system was once thought infallible SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) providers all trumpet the robustness of their systems, often claiming that security in the cloud is tighter than in most enterprises. But the simple fact is that every security system that has ever been breached was once thought infallible. While cloud service providers face similar security issues as other sorts of organizations, analysts warn that the cloud is becoming particularly attractive to cyber crooks.

B.

Understand the risks of cloud computing Cloud service users need to be vigilant in understanding the risks of data breaches in this new environment .For their part, companies need to be vigilant, for instance about how passwords are assigned, protected and changed. Cloud service providers typically work with numbers of third parties, and customers are advised to gain information about those companies which could potentially access their data.

C.

How could Hosting companies have Approached Security As with most SaaS offerings, the applications forming SmartClear's offering are constantly being tweaked and revised, a fact which raises more security issues for customers. Companies need to know, for instance, whether a software change might actually alter its security settings. Until it is there are nevertheless a handful of existing web standards which companies in the cloud should know about. Chief among these is ISO27001, which is designed to provide the foundations for third party audit, and implements OECD principles governing security of information and network systems. The SAS70 auditing standard is also used by cloud service providers.

III.

Technical impact.

While the evolution of cloud computing will take several years or even a decade to fully unfold, the three core technologies that will enable it virtualization, multitenancy and Web services are rapidly taking shape. Virtualization is the technology that hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, instead presenting an abstract, emulated

computing platform. This emulated computing platform for all practical purposes behaves like an independent system, but unlike a physical system, can be configured on demand, and maintained and replicated very easily. A related concept is that of multitenancy, whereby a single instance of an application software serves multiple clients. This allows better utilization of a system's resources the requirements of which could otherwise be considerable if the software instance had to be duplicated for each individual client. A Web service is defined by the W3C as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. The difinition encompasses many different systems, but in common usage the term refers to clients and servers that communicate over the HTTP protocol used on the Web. Web services help standardize the interfaces between applications, making it easier for a software client to access server applications over a network.

4.

CONCLUSION

The long dreamed vision of computing as a utility is finally emerging. The elasticity of a utility matches the need of businesses providing services directly to customers over the Internet, as workloads can grow far faster than 20 years ago. It used to take years to grow a business to several million customers, now it can happen in months. From the cloud providers view, the construction of very large datacenters at low cost sites using commodity computing, storage, and networking uncovered the possibility of selling those resources on a pay-as-you-go model below the costs of many medium-sized datacenters, while making a profit by statistically multiplexing among a large group of customers. As Cloud Computing users, we were relieved of dealing with the twin dangers of over-provisioning and under-provisioning our internal datacenters.