BSIT400-T301 Cloud Computing & Governance (2183-1)

About The Author

Hello all, my name is Troy and I am a senior in the BSIT Program at Bellevue University. I have created this blog for the class; BSIT400-T301 Cloud Computing & Governance. Since this is my first week's blog for this class, I decided to pick a fun topic. After this week, I will talk more about the main types of cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and how they shape everything around us. I hope that you enjoy reading my blog and thank you!

Week One Blog Entry 

Cloud Saves and Steam!

About a year ago, PC GAMER asked the retail giant Steam why their cloud system isn't supported by all of it's games? Some games that don't support Cloud saves are Arma 3 & Kerbal Space Program. 

Arma's developers said that the save system is too complex with too many variables in the game for Steam Cloud saves to work with it. To be honest, I don't see the issue here since we have SaaS models such as Microsoft's OneDrive; will automatically sync over your My Documents folder every time you boot your machine. Although games such as Arma 3 doesn't support Steam Cloud Saves; thousands of other great games do! the original article by PC GAMER is: http://www.pcgamer.com/why-doesnt-every-game-support-cloud-saves/ and it has other tips for being able to automatically save your game data for games such as Arma 3.

Stay tuned for more posts to come,

Thanks!

References

Birnbaum, I. (2016, November 17). Why doesn’t every game support cloud saves? Retrieved from http://www.pcgamer.com: http://www.pcgamer.com/why-doesnt-every-game-support-cloud-saves/

Stamey, L. (2017, May 30). IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS Cloud Models (Differences & Examples). Retrieved from http://www.hostingadvice.com: http://www.hostingadvice.com/how-to/iaas-vs-paas-vs-saas/

Week Two Blog Entry 

Is Your Enterprise Ready for the Cloud?

Some organizations have more capital than others and would benefit more from the security standpoint of not having a hybrid or full cloud infrastructure. Organizations such as banks, government entities, military and private law firms may not fit well with a public cloud IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service provided solution. Reasons are: They have static and unchanged workloads or high demands for security of big data that would reside better on their own in-house infrastructure.

However, a company such as Netflix, Hulu or Vudu may be better suited to IaaS and SaaS or Software as a Service provided solution versus their own in-house datacenters. Since cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Azure can easily fit their bill to serve streams to customers and offer dynamically scaled options that can be lowered or raised as seen fit by them.

References

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Three Blog Entry 

Is Cloud Computing a driver for Outsourcing?

A person could say that cloud computing “itself” is not outsourcing. However, when you lay out the terms side by side on paper, they have some similarity. Cloud computing refers to “pooled computing resources offered by a provider to customers over a network as a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, (ITpreneurs, 2012)”. While according to the Google search engine, outsourcing is to contract to delegate work outside of your company. So really, a person could say that cloud computing is a form of outsourcing a company’s infrastructure or application development environment to a third party.

The major different between the two is that cloud computing is relevant to IT only; while outsourcing is related to numerous fields and services besides IT. So, after comparing the two meanings of these words. Do you think that cloud computing drives more outsourcing to take place in this world? I believe that cloud computing does drive outsourcing for two reasons. The first reason: Many of the company’s that host IaaS, SaaS and PaaS services are huge outsourcing companies to individuals with the H1B visas. Which is outsourcing because these individuals are not Americans.  

The second reason: The very definition of cloud computing refers to a pooled resource being offered by provider... as mentioned above, (ITpreneurs, 2012).  The provider is the company that is paid for a rented service or “outsourced” too.  A person could say that the company outsources their infrastructure group via renting a third-party company to do the work.

Works Cited

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Four Blog Entry 

Security and Confidentiality in Cloud Computing?

Hello everyone,

I hope that you all had a great Christmas and a happy New Years with your friends and family. The source that I used from my class states that the security level for a cloud based Infrastructure, Platform or Software solution would be more secure versus that which is created by a private organization for itself. The source states that these Cloud companies periodically conduct third party audits on security. I would agree with this in a broader-scope; but I disagree for some organizations. On a narrower-scope; some companies (not all) do the same thing for their own internal environments. Along with security; the term of confidentiality is important to sensitive organizational data. The tool that is used to protect that data is by the means of encrypted local or network attached storage. In simpler terms, the data is scrambled to the outside eye without first unlocking that data. If you don't have the internal rights to access that data; your computer or mobile device will even be able to attempt in viewing that data as the decryption key will be required unscramble the data for you to access (read/write) to it.   

Works Cited

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Five Blog Entry 

Positive or Negative Aspects to the Public Cloud

Good evening everyone and I hope that your week has gone well. This I will be discussing the cloud environment and focus on the public cloud.

To begin; the public cloud environment is one of three main types of cloud environments, or public, private and hybrid cloud types. Although it is the cheapest form of cloud to purchase; it is also the type with the most vulnerability to a breach as anyone with internet access can penetrate the system.

Another negative aspect for public cloud is that the customer is not given control of the computing hardware/software. Whatever the provider allows control of becomes the limit to the configuration of the virtual environment.

Works Cited

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

 TechoTalk. Published on Oct 6, 2015. Cloud Computing for beginners - Types of Cloud (Public , Private & Hybrid Clouds).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veNmlsyV7Nw

Week Six Blog Entry 

Addition of Cloud Computing Infrastructure may be Challenging

Hello all, I hope that your week has been good! This week I am going to talk about the challenges of moving a company over to the cloud. When an enterprise decides to implement a Cloud environment; public, hybrid or private. It doesn’t matter which environment is planned; there will be issues that occur while the migration is on-going and even after it’s completed. The one concept to realize is that once everything is integrated into the cloud; there will be additional security risks to consider. Data is no longer proprietary to internal networks; it’s either shared over the cloud or readily available from the cloud. Additionally, application performance and latency will be issues to remedy as time goes on; especially during busy periods of the work week.  The provider could have security breaches or system issues that could cause any of the above. Also, the internal organization could have latency issues with their Wide Area Network where data is sent to the cloud assets; posing latency from the enterprise side as well.

Hardware such as found in the data center or internal enterprises server rooms could become security loopholes; as seen with the latest Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities where the CPU of the servers are the new exploit. As mentioned above, there are many things to consider in this endeavor.

Works Cited
ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Seven Blog Entry

Cloud Computing is Changing the Computer Software Model

Good evening everyone, here is Week Seven's Blog for All Things in The Cloud. This week we are going to talk about how the Cloud Computing Model has changed the software sale model. Before the cloud; software was either purchased perpetually with a one time-fee. Unlike with the cloud environment, it was installed locally to the workstation or server.  Since the cloud model has become mainstream; many vendors that originally sold standalone software are now changing their roles to a subscription based selling model with software that is streamed over and web browser or even downloaded and installed to be routinely updated from the internet. In other words; boxed software with disks is a thing of the past. You longer need to store or register CD/DVD keys and software serial numbers. Now, you need an account and a password to purchase or update software on your machines. Many traditional software companies have embraced this cloud model offering of software. For example, Microsoft Office Products have become more oriented to O365 and Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator etc.; have migrated to the Creative Cloud solution or Acrobat DC (Document Cloud).  

References

Golden, B. (2012, October 11). Cloud Computing Pushes Vendors to Seek New Roles in IT Value Chain. Retrieved from www.cio.com: https://www.cio.com/article/2391387/cloud-computing/cloud-computing-pushes-vendors-to-seek-new-roles-in-it-value-chain.html

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Subscription-based licensing model vs. perpetual licensing model. (n.d.). Retrieved from sales.jetbrains.com: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subscription-based-licensing-model-vs-perpetual-licensing-model

Week Eight Blog Entry

Vendor Lock-in

If you haven’t heard this question; you may be new to the Cloud business or even to the profession of IT. However, it isn’t very complicated to grasp. On the flipside; it’s somewhat complicated to get out of the dependency for a Vendor’s software or services if lock-in happens to your business. Vendor Lock-in is where your business pays a certain company a fee for access to their software, infrastructure or platform.

A good example of this lock-in is Netflix! That’s right; I said it. Netflix utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service Provider (IaaS). Netflix is so in bed with Amazon that if AWS decided to stop working one day; Netflix would stop working too. Now, of course the likelihood of that happening is slim to none; minus the occurrence of a catastrophic life changing event on earth. It’s very unlikely that Netflix will just stop working since AWS provides a 99.99% high availability rate during the year.

When a company becomes completely reliant on a single vendor for any type of service; they are locked-in with that vendor. Although it’s nearly impossible to not be tied to a vendor for services or software these days; it’s still important to have an exist strategy and to always understand what rights the SLA entitles your company too and what rights the vendor has over your company, if things ever go sideways.

References

Chan, M. (2017, Sep 18). 6 things you can do to avoid cloud vendor lock-in. Retrieved from www.thorntech.com: https://www.thorntech.com/2017/09/avoidingcloudvendorlockin/

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Nine Blog Entry

Cloud Vendor Review

Hello all! Welcome to another week of All Things in the Cloud. This week, I will discuss a review of Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers numerous packages, so I will only go over the main choices. The choices are: Amazon EC2, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda.

·        Lambda is a service that computes your code and manages compute resources.

·        Amazon S3 is cloud storage
·        RDS is database storage
·        Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-driven business analytics service that cost a fraction of the competitions’ prices
·        EC2 is a platform service that offers multiple OS solutions

Amazon is argued to be the biggest or second biggest cloud provider, depending on what reviewer you are looking at. However, you can’t go wrong with choosing AWS services, either way. 

References

AWS Free Tier Details. (n.d.). Retrieved from aws.amazon.com: https://aws.amazon.com/free/?sc_channel=PS&sc_campaign=acquisition_US&sc_publisher=google&sc_medium=cloud_computing_b&sc_content=aws_core_p_control_q32016&sc_detail=aws%20services&sc_category=cloud_computing&sc_segment=188908164616&sc_matchtype=p&sc_count

Week Ten Blog Entry

ITIL Verse the Traditional IT Design

Hello all! Welcome to another week of All Things in the Cloud. This week I will discuss the big reason that organizations are shifting from the traditional IT model and over to the cloud ITIL model. The traditional IT model requires a full infrastructure department, SharePoint department and an abundance of server hardware, networking hardware and constant attention and money during on and off hours from those departments in maintaining the internal IT systems overhead. ITIL is the new deal and many companies are moving to it as it saves that time and money that was spent on maintaining an environment so that those departments can work on making things run more smoothly with the organizational customers. Incorporating ITIL is pretty streamlined as there is a simple series of steps that must be performed:

·        Service Strategy

·        Service Design

·        Service Adoption

·        Service Transition, (ITpreneurs, 2012)

Once a company moves over to the cloud, they can pay-as-they-go and concentrate more on making a polished product for a customer with less downtime and save the company time and money.

Works Cited

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week Eleven Blog Entry

Pros and Cons to Cloud Computing

Hello all! Welcome to another week of All Things in the Cloud. This week I will discuss the Pros and Cons to Cloud Computing. So, the cons to Cloud Computing are:

·         The Cloud Service Provider or CSP, may have a different schedule for OS and application patching windows versus that of their clients

·         Network connectivity issues or bankruptcy is an ongoing risk for both client and CSP

·         Customers don’t own their data; the CSP owns it. Client and provider need to work mutually for the data to remain safe

The pros to Cloud Computing are:

·         Less workload for the cloud customer as the CSP will maintain all SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS systems.

·         External audits are required to meet industry requirements on a specified, continual basis.

·         The CSP are considered experts in their respective services, so they can follow specifically important security principles to protect the customer’s data.

References

ITpreneurs. (2012). CompTIA® Cloud Essentials™ Certification Study Guide. New York: ITpreneurs Nederland B.V.

Week 12 FINAL Blog Posting

Hello all, welcome to my final blog posting for this class. It has been fun, and I hope that anyone reading my weekly material learned something. This week, I will wrap things up with an analysis of the past 11 weeks. Looking back at my topics, I wrote on a variety of things such as:

Cloud Saves and Third Party Digital Rights Management-Gaming Software

Enterprise Readiness for the Cloud

Outsourcing and correlation to the Cloud

How secure is the Cloud?

Positive or Negative Aspects to the Cloud

Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Cloud Computing Impact to Vendor Lock-in

Vendors in Cloud Computing

ITIL verse Traditional IT Structuring

Although I relied on the class source material for my blogs, I also incorporated many external internet sources provide more detailed articles. If somebody is looking for a good summary on different Cloud related articles, this blog will assist them. I tried to keep the blogs relatively short as it is a blog, but I did add as many points to each week’s lesson as I could.

Thank you for reading my blogs and I wish you a great rest of your week!