Available options for data sharing and management

Soft-Arc civil engineering Company being a multi-national organization is under continuous need for information exchange and communication across different boundaries.  Also there is need for the organization to regularly share the information across different employees of the organization across the boundaries. In this regard several options are available and the current write-up will evaluate the relative feasibility of each of the options in hand and there is thorough discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of these options with sufficient detailing.  The organization is mid-sized with about 200 employees and Soft-Arc has not intentions of extending its employees in near future. The current operations are being made from four nations viz., Australia, Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea.  It is possible for the organization to meet its functional and operational requirements of data exchange and management as well as information sharing in real time, by having data centers at each of the operational centers in the organization. This will enable real time data exchange through net connectivity and will provide all the necessary information exchange possible. Secondly it is possible that there can be information exchange across the 4 data centers through utilizing co-location services. Co-location services will enable the organization to share the infrastructural resources with another utilize and will reduce the overall expenses that incurs during the process. The third option is the cloud computing, which has no limitations in several ways. Information sharing and data exchange will be actually performed without any limit as well has several other advantages and hence is viable option. The following discussion focuses on more in-depth analysis of all the above issues with sufficient detailing as per the requirements specified in the discussion. 

Figure 1 Organizational map of Soft-Arc

Important necessity of the organization is to share the IT resources of the organization for the sake of day to day organizational functionality. The main focus areas of the exchange are email sharing, data base sharing as well as real time operational processing and relevant information processing. Unsaid requirement of the organization is the need to maintain the data integrity as well. Soft-Arc involves engineering activities and all the data and information that will be exchanged from time to time is required to be maintained at maximum safety and there should not be any breach of the same owing to the commercial interests of the organization and the client data integrity requirements. Hence when it is needed to keep up the office automation active, the tools employed for the process should have all the necessary pre-requirements like compliance to provide the services in accordance with the organizational requirements as well the selected tool for office automation should be in-line with the organizational policies and concerns. Data sharing and information sharing can be done through cloud computing as well as co-location. Both the options are technically viable and can provide the required features and organizational objectives in real time with ease. However co-location requires sharing the infrastructural facilities for data storage and sharing with other potential utility partners. Hence this can be cost effective than other options. Also the requirements of the infrastructural operational and maintenance needs can be shared with other utility partner and hence the overall costs of operation will come down drastically. For co-location service it may be possible that the resources can be shared using the option of net-working. Co-location and sharing option will also be comfortable and will enable the organization to share some of the expenses like utility bills to maintain the infrastructural facilities of the co-location region. However cloud services sharing is an alternative to the co-location.  The option has all the features like enabling the data sharing and data management as in the case of co-location. Further there are distinct advantages with cloud sharing facilities, cloud sharing has an advantage of real-time capabilities tailoring to the requirements. Organization can take up any amount of data usage as per the requirements without actually worrying for the infrastructural  facilities and other related utility requirements. Apparently the manpower and organizational resources are free and available for using for any productive activities. As a whole, Soft-Arc can opt for cloud computing as it has advantages to tailor to the needs and will enable the organization to use its resources for its regular functional requirements without worrying of any other technical issues. 

Feasibility analysis of available options

As far as technical and functional viability is concerned, both co-location as well as cloud services are equally viable and capable to meet the organizational requirements of the organization. However cost incurred in co-location will be less when compared with cloud services. The exact cost and the complexity may change from location to location and depends on other factors as well, however the actual cost of the co-location is definitely less than the cloud service. Since the organization is active in engineering services and there is sufficient scope for the organizational requirements to grow from year to year. The ease in operations of the organization is also so flexible that co-location can be a more viable option.  The negative side of cloud service is data security issues. It is true that inevitably the services received by the organization will be offered by third parties and there is mandatory forced reliance on other party policies and procedures for data sharing and information management services. However still now a days there are number of options coming up like certification and mandatory compliance requirements for cloud services. Hence selecting a right cloud service will relieve the organizational worry regarding the data security. Since Soft-Arc at present is functioning in the main stream operational domain for number of cloud services hence there is sufficient autonomy available for the organization to select any suitable available network.

 

Figure 2 Cloud Architecture 

I strongly advice Soft-Arc to opt for cloud computing services for the sake of information sharing and exchange requirements.  Soft-Arc is limited in its employee number and there is no interest for the organization to spend its resources unnecessarily, so I wish Soft-Arc to go for cloud services option for data sharing across all of its four functional centers. 

Soft-Arc do have dedicated Operational Data Centers and they are perfectly enabling the data sharing and management without any hurdles at present. They are made of fiber based WAN connections and they integrated with HPE3PAR SAN systems. Also there are RHEL 6 servers working at present to host the web page related information of the organization. Here the two options at present available for soft-Arc are either to migrate its services to IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) type of service or continue its services based on the dedicated data units available(Jadeja,2012).

Keeping up its own dedicated data centers is always risky for the organization. It may be required for the organization to always integrate and occasionally required to do scale up the capabilities to the meet the changing organizational requirements (Mell, 2009). Also the maintenance and other operational supervision of the resources (Servers) solely rest with the soft-Arc(Chow,2009). There is no doubt that the organization needs to spend considerable effort in maintaining the same and definitely it will involve its productive time and monetary resources (Zhang, 2010). A cloud services is easier to take up, there is no need to worry for the scaling and maintenance issues (Armburst, 2010). Also cloud(Ograph,2008) offers peculiar advantages of data integrity, it is possible for the organization to recover the valuable information from the cloud in case of disasters and it is definitely a safer and secured option for data security concerns(Wei,2014).

Advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing and co-location

Enterprise data center solely rests within the organization control whereas cloud service invariably will be in the hands of the third party and certain amount of security risk always present. However considering the advantages of the system as well as the considering the recent developments making the cloud service more reliable in security aspects, it is advisable to opt for IaaS(Pearson,2009). 

Conclusion:

Hence IaaS  is the right solution for the organization. However there is need to consider the right service provider to enable the organization to use the best services for the organizational requirements. It is possible to for Soft-Arc to go ahead for its migration towards IaaS without any hassles. 

References:

Wei, L., Zhu, H., Cao, Z., Dong, X., Jia, W., Chen, Y., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2014). Security and privacy for storage and computation in cloud computing. Information Sciences, 258, 371-386. 

Chow, R., Golle, P., Jakobsson, M., Shi, E., Staddon, J., Masuoka, R., & Molina, J. (2009, November). Controlling data in the cloud: outsourcing computation without outsourcing control. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security (pp. 85-90). ACM. 

Pearson, S. (2009, May). Taking account of privacy when designing cloud computing services. In Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing (pp. 44-52). IEEE Computer Society. 

Jadeja, Y., & Modi, K. (2012, March). Cloud computing-concepts, architecture and challenges. In Computing, Electronics and Electrical Technologies (ICCEET), 2012 International Conference on (pp. 877-880). IEEE. 

Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., … & Zaharia, M. (2010). A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 50-58. 

Zhang, Q., Cheng, L., & Boutaba, R. (2010). Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of internet services and applications, 1(1), 7-18. 

Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2009). The NIST definition of cloud computing. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 53(6),50.  

IaaS is infrastructure as a service option, PaaS is the platform as a service option, SaaS is software as a service option (Dhillon, 2010). All the three services are different when it comes to their individual features and the applicability; however the selection of the right solution depends on the enterprise need. All the three services can be availed through the cloud based net services (IaaS,2013).  SaaS enables typical softwares like web browsers to be shared for the organizational requirements (Luo, 2011). There are several options like Google Apps, Drop Box etc which perfectly works for the organization information sharing requirements (Bharadwaj, 2010). PaaS is a platform sharing application where in the services features are at lower level than SaaS (Doelitzscher,2011). IaaS is more complex option and will render several features for the organization like information sharing, organizational operational requirements sharing etc (Kavis, 2014).

Figure 3  Cloud Architecture- overview  

When it comes to share the office requirements of the organization across its all the four operational centers, it can be done through SaaS on cloud services. SharePoint is one such utility which is a SaaS and will work for sharing of the information through cloud services. 

SaaS has the features of data security and related issues. Since cloud is a third party resource, there is scope for security compromise in case of misused services. Also the SaaS updating and version revisions will be forced on the organizational usage and it is required for the users to embrace the updates from time to time(Takabi,2010). 

It is possible that Soft-Arc can use SaaS for sharing requirements, however it is advised that the organization can either use additional security measures or other modes of information sharing while dealing with more critical information sharing on cloud(So,2011). 

References: 

Luo, J. Z., Jin, J. H., Song, A. B., & Dong, F. (2011). Cloud computing: architecture and key technologies. Journal of China Institute of Communications, 32(7), 3-21. 

Bhardwaj, S., Jain, L., & Jain, S. (2010). Cloud computing: A study of infrastructure as a service (IAAS). International Journal of engineering and information Technology, 2(1), 60-63. 

Dillon, T., Wu, C., & Chang, E. (2010, April). Cloud computing: issues and challenges. In Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2010 24th IEEE International Conference on (pp. 27-33). Ieee. 

Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: Design decisions for cloud computing service models (SaaS, PaaS, AND IaaS). John Wiley & Sons. 

Doelitzscher, F., Sulistio, A., Reich, C., Kuijs, H., & Wolf, D. (2011). Private cloud for collaboration and e-Learning services: from IaaS to SaaS. Computing, 91(1), 23-42. 

Takabi, H., Joshi, J. B., & Ahn, G. J. (2010). Security and privacy challenges in cloud computing environments. IEEE Security & Privacy, 8(6), 24-31. 

So, K. (2011). Cloud computing security issues and challenges. International Journal of Computer Networks, 3(5), 247-55. 

IaaS, P. (2013). SaaS (Explained and Compared). Apprenda. Saatavissa: https://apprenda. com/library/paas/iaas-paas-saas-explained-compared/. Hakupäivä, 10.