Question

Your company is evaluating the option of renting some of its computing services from a cloud provider. After many discussions, your company is considering renting only the accounting module. Your supervisor has asked you to develop, as soon as possible, a short document about how this type of service is provided by a cloud computing provider and the necessary steps that should be taken to implement this service. (Q6.4, 6.5)

Your report to your supervisor would include:

1. The problems with and opportunities for cloud migration

2. The risk associated with using a cloud accounting system

3. How important is the reliability of the service provider (for example Amazon.com)?

4. Issues associated with cloud service interruption

Migrating into cloud is considered a project and like all IT technologies should go through all phases of systems development life cycle.

Answer 1

1. The possible risks associated with cloud migration:-

• If your application stores and retrieves very sensitive data, you might not be able to maintain it in the cloud. Similarly, compliance requirements could also limit your choices.
• If everything is running fine with its existing setup, doesn’t demand much maintenance, scaling, and availability, and your customers are all happy, why mess with it?
• If some of the technology you currently rely on is proprietary, you may not be legally able to deploy it to the cloud.
• Some operations might suffer from added latency when using cloud applications over the Internet.
• You might lose some transparency and control while debugging performance issues because the hardware is controlled by someone else.
• You particular application design and architecture might not completely follow distributed cloud architectures, and might, therefore, require some modifications.

Possible benefits of a cloud migration:-

• Your application is experiencing increased traffic and you’re finding it difficult to scale resources on the fly to meet the increasing demand.
• You need to reduce operational costs, while increasing IT effectiveness.
• Your clients require fast application implementation and deployment, and thus want to focus more on development while reducing infrastructure overhead.
• Your clients want to expand their business geographically, but you suspect that setting up a multi-region infrastructure – with all the associated maintenance, time, human, and error control effort – is going to be a challenge.
• You’re finding that keeping up with growing storage needs is becoming a problem.
• You’d like to build a widely distributed development team. Cloud computing environments allow remotely located employees to access applications and work via the Internet.
• Setting up a disaster recovery system for an entire data center can sometimes nearly double the cost, and also require complex disaster recovery plans. Cloud DR systems can be implemented much more quickly and simply while allowing far better control over resources.
• Tracking and upgrading underlying server software can consume a lot of time. In some cases, a cloud provider will take care of this automatically. Some Cloud Computing models similarly handle many administration tasks like database backup, software upgrades, and periodic maintenance.

  

2)The world of cloud accounting is not without risk. These solutions are new and require that you perform the necessary due diligence to determine if the solution is right for your business. Here are a few of the risks:

• The vendor goes away:- Over a decade ago, we experienced a tech bubble where vendors were here one day and gone the next. The same risk exists with cloud accounting vendors. It is important to have a contingency plan.
• You don’t have Internet access :- Cloud accounting vendors are accessible from anywhere and anytime assuming that you have a connection to the Internet. If you find yourself without internet access, you will not have access to your accounting data.
• Security breach :- Cloud accounting software and your data both live on the Internet. There is a risk that someone could gain access to your data

3) On the whole, from a security and relability standpoint, this is usually a good thing. Amazon, like most other major cloud providers, has invested in both resources and very taledted security engineers to ensure that its infrastructure is well protected and resileint. without a doubt, it does a better job at providing security than most of their customers would be able to do on their own.

But nobody's is perfect, and when you've got thousands of customers all relying on a single service provider and something does go wrong, it's nolonger a small isolatd incident.

So does cloud computing make the internet more secure and reliable? Yes and no. The individual customers of Amazon Web Services is probably less likely to get compromised or experience outages than they were when they were handling those issues on their own. That means fewer small-scale security and reliability problems affecting individual businesses and being handled by relative amateurs.

4) When it comes to cloud computing, users and providers alike are still exploring the unforeseen while adapting to these new infrastures. Inevitably, issues with downtime and unexpected outages will occur. Even the biggest and best cloud companies have seen their best-laid plans go to waste as teir services go dark for hous at a time. Even during a beta period, a cloud sevice can suffer an unexpected outage