Sunday, 13 November 2016

Week 2 [14.11-20.11.2016] Cloud computing

Good evening everyone,

Reading answers for Week1 I’ve noticed that some topics were too refined so it was difficult to have an opinion on. Having that in mind I propose to discuss something that we all know a lot of.
In this article I raised the issue of the impact of cloud computing services on the economic efficiency of companies. I primarily concentrated on the benefits which companies accrue, in particular, the flexible use of resources of cloud computing without the necessity to make additional investments  in their IT infrastructure. I also put attention on  the question of the risks associated with the use of cloud computing. This concerns mainly the loss of data, which may result in adverse economic effects for a company. However, I estimated that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks.
Please asked the following questions:
  1. Do you know of any others benefits which companies accrue using cloud?
  2. Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?
  3. Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?

24 comments:

  1. 1. Do you know of any others benefits which companies accrue using cloud?

    Obviously I know multiple benefits which companies accrue using cloud. First of all - flexibility - all workers can contribute to all files wherever they are, even in different country. All of them can share information in real time via shared storage. It reduces both cost and time as well as improve product development and customer service.

    Secondly - disaster recovery - it is amazingly important to have backup of all data. Cloud make recovery much simpler than other traditional methods of data storage.

    Another important factor - cost - it is probably the most efficient method to use, maintain and upgrade. In comparison to physical drives it is much cheaper and there are multiple options available : one-time-payment, pay-as-you-go and others.


    2. Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?

    Well in my opinion the biggest concern is trust between company using cloud and the company offering cloud services. Those concerns are about technical issues - internet connection or rather the lack of it. Some dysfunctions that have to be repaired and company have to wait and can’t be sure when everything will work again.

    The other problem are attacks of hackers and threats. This could potentially put company to great risk. But this is rather about choosing reliable service provider with totally secure system.

    3. Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?

    I think that computing services outweigh the risks and I can’t imagine being stuck with physical drives. The technology is so advances that we can be sure about security of the data.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for your comprehensive response to the questions. Regards, Marcin.

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  2. Thanks for the article but in my opinion this topic is a little boring because it is too often explored during this course ;-)
    Moreover about you questions I reckon you go on a wrong path. In my opinion questions should not cover cases about technical issues for example infrastructure flexibility, equipment and areas savings because this is too obvious to talk about it. If we take a look at a clouds only via technical aspects clouds are close to perfect decision for almost all companies . There are a lot of benefits to use clouds and only a few disadvantages . In my opinion my reason to use or not to use clouds is security aspects. Clouds (no meter public or private) are structures outside our company (buildings or areas) and finally we don't know where our data is and where and who can investigate it? If a company can allow such kind of risk clouds are the best solution. Therefore for companies which must first of all protect their data clouds will never be a good solution even with the cryptography solutions.

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    Replies
    1. I share the same concern. The main issue in cloud business is security and data ownership. Did you read latest news about The European Union plans to tighten-up data protection?

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  3. Ad. 1
    We can reduce maintenance costs such as:
    Integration cost
    Delivery/Deployment cost
    and any other costs related to software management
    ad 2.
    On of my concerns if it comes for cloud computing is service availability for example if we are using some service that is hosted on Heroku (on of PaaS services) the real availability is product of availabilities of: availability of service that I am using, Heroku availability, AWS availability, availability of third parties that AWS is using and straight to the point we as a users are not informed about this by service providers
    ad 3.
    yes in my opinion cloud computing or other cloud services are giving great opportunities to business all around the world

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  4. Do you know any other benefits that accrue from using cloud?
    As for me, responsiveness is the most important feature. Often the payment only

    Do you have concerns about the choice actually use cloud computing?
    There are several solutions on the market. Sometimes they are similar. But we can choose the best solution for us, seamlessly.

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  5. Cloud is flexible - that's obvious. You can your infrastructure both horizontally and vertically. moreover you can change your price plan and scale for incoming increased traffic (e.g. Christmas or Black Friday sale) and return to previous price plan when the traffic stabilizes. Cloud helps to reduce hardware cost and it can reduce employment costs, because company using cloud does not need as many admins as company not using cloud. You can set-up an environment in couple of minutes using pre-configured system images.
    Cloud also offers dedicated services like AWS Lambda, event driven compute service that one can simply run in the cloud without worrying about software installation or maintenance.
    Regarding service availability, you can purchase an instance with 99.99% availability and I'm not sure if you can get any better with that.

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    Replies
    1. Good point Mikołaj. Availability have to be always taking into consideration.

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  6. Hi, regarding to yours first sentence I understand that you are not a fan of process mining ;). But let's go back to the questions. Cloud computing is for sure interesting topic, which was described in many publications, websites, blogs etc. If we are talking about pros - the biggest from my perspective is that the company, which offers this kind of services should hire specialists with advanced level of knowledge and uses stable technology. It guarantee that the our data is secured and we do not have be scared about its loss. They are responsible for data consistency - we have to ensure only proper level of user privileges and user passwords.

    The biggest problem is service level and costs. On the market we can find different offers. The challenge is to choose company that services aims into our needs and service quality is proportional to price.

    Regarding to last question .. yes, but I always have additional backup :)

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    Replies
    1. TOC (total cost of ownership) is very interesting topic. The question is if customers would pay more for a better service experience?

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    2. It depends. I had the situation where service provider raised up prices and I made migration to another provider. LSA is at the same level but unfortunately they can not achieve as good results as contract says. Never the less I have two mirror services there in two different locations so partially I take care about LSA to meet my customers expectations. I forgot to add it is marked as cloud service :) and I pay less for two mirror services than in previous company. They haven't lost the data for 3 yrs but service was unavailable sometimes.

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  7. About a topic I totally agree with ZC, it's too often explored in this course by the same people :-).
    And going back to your questions. For me the biggest advantage of cloud computing is cheap hard disk space and this the most important thing for me. Other as flexibility and reliability.
    On second question I'll answer - yes :-). Another minus in this group should be privacy of data and this is quite important because I don't think that you would like to share your photos with other. Companies like to know what is on their drives.
    Last one, I think yes I have never lost any data so it must be reliable. But my previous company lost some content from google drives.

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    Replies
    1. What about global availability ? It is not important for you to have an access to data from different places?

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  9. Do you know of any others benefits which companies accrue using cloud?
    There are a lot of benefits from using a cloud. The most fundamentals are faster computations for less money, sharing files with everyone, easy access, different level of authorization so one user can just read file another can also edit it, less problem with physical space for computers and servers because everything can be stored outside the company.

    Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?
    The main problems are safety of the data and accessibility. The first one refers to the situation when files are stored on external servers of another company. Sometimes such servers require accepting policy which stands that provider of a cloud has access to the data. The second one is a problem because if there is some crash in external servers the company can't do anything with it. They have to rely on their own backups.

    Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?

    It always depends on company profile and size. If the data is confidential it is not a good idea to store it on some external servers and operate on it in the cloud. In other cases I think cloud computing is worth to consider.

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  11. I think that this article mentions the most important issues. The main business benefits companies accrue withe the cloud usage are the quick disaster recovery as well as automatic software updates. Suppliers care about the maintanance of the system. Therefore, in case of any unfortunate events the consumer has an easy mind.
    In my opinion services offered by cloud computing speak in favour of the usage and many companies are and will be interested in such services. For some companies the risk is disproportionate to the costs.

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  12. Do you know of any others benefits which companies accrue using cloud?

    There are a lot of benefits of using clouds. In my opinion the main is flexibility of the solution. The company can easly add or remove some resources from the cloud, use several technologies and different environments.
    The costs of cloud infrastructure are low, backup and maintenance is provided by the cloud owner.

    Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?

    I think the two main concerns are availability and security of the information. They are the topics that usually largely depends on our cloud providers, so we need to know that we can trust them.

    Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?

    The market shows that the benefits are greater than risks. Many companies (and also private people) are using or starting to use clouds for their IT needs.
    It also of course depends on a policy and the profile company. The ones that manage a lot of sensitive data will be more carefully in storing them outside of their network.

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  13. Do you know of any others benefits which companies accrue using cloud?
    It's hard to add something new to my colleagues answers. Cloud is cheaper, easier to set up, terminate and scale. Most clouds have built in backups and are located in a variety of places to lower the latency.
    Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?
    In my honest opinion the main concern is security. If we choose to use Azure or AWS there is a high chance that we are sharing our data with US government.
    Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?
    For sure, especially for start ups and small companies which can easily start using resources too expensive for them at the beginning. However, they should be aware of the potential risk of losing all the data and the infrastructure.

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  14. There are many cloud infrastructure on the market that are similar to cities or forts in the Internet. I always want use Amazon AWS web service but if I am correct there are huge cost required to maintain. To be honest risk of data loose in the cloud infrastructure are connected with hackers activity. There are examples in history that are other companies that didn't survive in internet. Users should have possibility to collect data before infrastructure downtime. However it is so easy to store data in mobile world that tempt lots of internet users to benefit from this service.

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  15. We live in times of cost optimisation, so more and more companies decide to use clouds, as this is a cheap and efficient way od data storage. What's more employees can share and exchange, and modify pieces of information in real time. It's far less time consuming than sending thousands of e-mails or working in groups using various communicators and sharing screens. Apart from that entities providing services to other entities can obtain all the necessary data from the client in a more efficient and easier manner. This also saves a lot of time and money. Nevertheless, we must not forget about the main disadvantage of such data storage such as where it is really stored and who has access to it. Is it really well kept? Is it really save? Is my private data really private? Is it really almost impossible to lose these pieces of information? Even though, we don't have all the answers for the questions above, we won't stop using clouds, as this is what world is now all about. We cannot stop technical progress and go back to "only physical drives era".

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  16. Hey thanks for presenting your article on the subject of Cloud Computing. As for the questions you've asked:

    1. There are many benefits of using the cloud and some of them are:
    a. scalability
    b. better resource allocation and balance in usage
    c. makes some aspects transparent so that users can focus on the actual tasks that they have to do without thinking about the deeper layers (i.e. server configuration etc.)
    2. Despite the many benefits however there are also some drawbacks. Nothing is ideal, and some of them are:
    a. privacy concerns - we don't know where exactly our files are located and who might access them (intentionally or not)
    b. dependence on the service provider
    3. It depends on the situation, however in the vast majority of cases I would say that benefits do outweigh the risks of using the cloud. Sometimes however it is not a good option, especially when the process of moving to the cloud would be too complicated and bring more expenditure than gain.

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  17. Do I correctly choice concerns related to cloud computing usage?
    - The paramount concern is the information security. When cloud service provider is attacked, the potential for data leakage might touch many companies that use the service.
    Do you think that the benefits of the use of Cloud computing services outweigh the risks ?
    - Benefits of cloud most definitely outweigh the concern, since easy access to data saved on cloud is crucial in modern business.

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  18. 1. In my view, cloud computing are ideal for emerging businesses, help reduce initial costs, which reduces the risks associated with falling activity.
    2. Yes, data security is an important issue, usually the weakest link is the owner, but as data on a personal computer is a little harder to get to them.
    3. Of course, the probability of profit is greater than the probability a loss - otherwise the development of this technology would be boors (sometimes there are counterexamples - Lotto has developed well and always the probability a loss was greater than the probability of profit:-))

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