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Increasing the Business Value through Cloud Computing Usage
Mona Jammal
Aand Nouf Alghamdi
BȦ
Information Systems Department, King Abul-Aziz University, Jeddah-KSA Ḃ
Information Systems Department, Majmaah University, Riyadh-KSA Ċ
Information Systems Department, King Abul-Aziz University, Jeddah-KSA
Abstract
Nowadays, business sector is growing tremendously fast in data storage for handling multiple data, huge number of applications and scalable hardware resulting in higher cost. These issues triggered the development of cloud computing technology and played a significant role at the level of business, economy and government; any related risks with such technology must be carefully considered in order to increase the business’ value and help managers to reach their goals. The objective of this paper is to present the usage of cloud computing in order to maximize the business value from two perspectives: the service provider w.r.t ROI growths and the clients in relation to cost reduction of resources and maintenance. The paper concludes by discussing the companies’ techniques to overcome such risks in order to gain business value.
Keywords: Cloud computing, public clouds, (PaaS), (SaaS), (IaaS), Security Risk.
I. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is a subsequent phase in the development phase of the Internet. It plays a significant role for different business sectors; different features can be delivered as a service wherever and whenever they need it such as: infrastructure, applications, business processes to personal collaboration [1]. Generally, it is used as a supportive tool for different companies in order to meet their needs, achieving their goals, and providing access to shared resources such as: storage, servers, and applications. Those assets can become with least administration exertion or service provider collaboration [2].
According to [1] [3] the fundamental concept of Cloud Computing was existed in 1950’s, when several companies provided access to their central large-scale mainframe computers from different employees who’s access from multiple terminal in order to cut budget and minimize the time of maintenance process. In 1970’s, the concept of VMs was created which allowed to execute multiple OS simultaneously in an isolated environment, in that time the VM concept took the shared access concept to main resource into the next level which executed multiple distinct OS inside one physical hardware, at that time the term of Cloud Computing was not known or clear, in 1999 the first milestones in Cloud Computing was introduced by Salesforce.com, they started to deliver enterprise applications via internet. The next stage was in 2002 when Amazon provided some cloud services such as: storage, and computation, after that in 2006, they established the Elastic Compute Cloud ―EC2‖ that allows multiple small enterprises to rent hardware contained their own applications. During the 2009, the evolution of Cloud Computing was started; several companies such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft were established to offer the access from anywhere and at any time for their users through their connected devices. In that time Cloud Computing technology had multiple related risks such as security
concerns and privacy, limited control and flexibility, and technical difficulties. From this, any company that wanted to stay in the competition environment, it must overcome these risks and be adaptable to any changes in the technology to reach the success.
This paper explains in section II the meaning of Cloud Computing, the different types of the infrastructures, and the related risks from two perspectives which are security risk and data availability and how these risks have been solved from others view in section III. Section IV discusses the usage of cloud computing technology and how it delivers the promised value to the business sector.
II. CLOUD COMPUTING CONCEPT A. Cloud Computing Definition
―Cloud is a parallel and distributed computing system which is consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements (SLA) established through negotiation between the service provider and the consumers‖ [4].
B. Cloud Computing Infrastructures Types and Models
The Cloud Computing has three types (deployment models) according to the usage [2]:
Public Clouds are clouds for anyone and everyone and they can be used by individuals or companies. The providers of this type of clouds offer free and paid models and they can provide storage or computing processes or maybe both. Dropbox is an example of this type.
Private Clouds offer private and dedicated storage and computing resources. This cloud’s infrastructure is exclusively used by a single organization.
Community Clouds are clouds for exclusive use by a group of users who share a common mission or regulations, for instance a cloud for government agencies.
Hybrid Clouds are clouds which are composed of one or more different cloud infrastructure (public, private, or community) [3].
Understanding the foundations of cloud computing calls for understanding three main cloud delivery models platform [5]:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Model, in this model the services provider will provide only the basic infrastructure components for their users such as: processing, storage, and network. Hence, the customer has the most control over the resources. For example, using Amazon Web Services, customers can choose computing power, memory, operating system, and storage based on their individual needs and requirements, thus being able to build (almost) their entire infrastructure in the cloud.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) Model, it delivers applications through the internet, so in this model the service provider allows the customers to run these applications that are typically designed by using several tools which are provided by the application’s owner. User has the rights in the control process over the applications but has limited or no control over the basic infrastructure. One example is Microsoft Azure, which acts as a cloud services operating system that customers can use to deploy custom applications.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Model, the customer uses only applications which are available on the cloud infrastructure. Typically, such applications include web-based email services (e.g., Google’s Gmail) and web-based productivity (such as Google Docs), but also advanced applications such as CRM systems, as provided by Salesforce.com. Typically, the customer cares only about the application, with no knowledge or control over the underlying infrastructure, and typically has no limited ability to control or configure application-specific settings; further, the customer does not have to worry about maintaining or updating the software, the underlying platform, or the hardware
infrastructure. Thus, applications under SaaS model are typically the easiest to deploy.
C. Cloud Computing Risks
There are several risks that are related to cloud which are [6] [7]:
Security Concerns and Privacy: Issues regarding security have to be considered as well. How an organization can guarantee all of its confidential information is safe and protected? Are the organization’s proprietary data accessible by the cloud provider, the competitor, or another cloud user? The cloud shows up a new dimension of security. New trust levels between providers, end users and enterprises are going to be created. Increased Vulnerability: The exposes of the
cloud-based solutions the public Internet and this increase the ability to hack the data by hackers and malicious users. Nothing on the public Internet is totally protected and no one is totally safe from the serious attacks. Moreover, because of the system dependencies, an attack on one data storage machine may cause a leakage of a personal data to the whole world.
Limited Control and Flexibility: Constrained control for the execution and elements of the hardware and software is given to the end clients in light of the fact that the services and applications run on remote, third party virtual environments. In addition, there is usually a lack of features for the applications which are running locally because the remote software is being used.
Technical Difficulties and Downtime: Companies will enjoy eliminating the headache of daily technical issues and will prefer handling those offsite. However, they should not forget that from time to time, the systems might face outages. Downtime and outages are possible even with the best cloud service providers; Amazon outage is the most famous example. Additionally, they should recollect that the entire setup is reliant on accessing the Internet; any connectivity issues will make the setup futile. Outages and downtime of the cloud make companies hesitant about the cloud’s decision and how much money and how many customers they will lose if the system down in unexpected time.
Compliance: Another question is raised by the compliance, who is the owner of the data? Are the data affected by hosting it in regional locations? As the Internet has become increasingly global, governments endeavored to control it through designing firewalls to so that will keep certain content inaccessible.
There is no doubt that the Cloud Computing gives a huge number of benefits to any business. However, there is lot of concerns that make some companies avoid using the Cloud Computing in their business.
There is doubtlessly putting your own information or running your product on somebody’s hard disk utilizing their CPU seems dangerous to numerous. Popular security issues, for example, information loss, phishing pose serious dangers to organization’s information and software.
III. LITERATURE REVIEW
As indicated by the literature review, one of the greatest Cloud Computing concerns is security. Information is not any more under the control of the organization and slanted to vulnerabilities and raise worries, for instance, privacy, verification, character administration, consistence, accessibility of information, uprightness, encryption, and system security and physical security on the grounds that applications and information being facilitated by an service provider.
A. Security Risk
Security issue in cloud computing is the main risk that may keep some organizations away from using it. Moreover, it is the major issue as we come to perceive the crevice between the provider’s claims and what clients’ need/procure. This part will explore proposed solutions that introduce by some researches whom interest in cloud computing and how to protect their clients' information assets to make it safe environment for using.
H. Qasim, E. Abu-shSanab [8] discussed the environment of the cloud computing, along with its nature and implementation. In addition, they mentioned what are the risks linked with such environment. Finally, they proposed a framework to relate the sort of business and the accessible choices of differing cloud computing situations. They summarized the main security attacks that may happen to the cloud such As: man in the middle, side channel attacks, security of the browser, authentication attack, cloud malware injection attacks and flooding attacks. The proposed framework divided the institutions to three categories: governmental, Financial and small/medium size businesses institutions. They suggested that the governmental institutions should create their private cloud because they have the greatest concern about the service provider's jurisdiction. With this solution they will have a better control, security, efficiency, more reliance and less cost. Financial institutions should adopt the private cloud too.
Since the public clouds with their pay as you go installment model, are less requesting as far as expense, the opportunity of administration for organizations, and the management services offered by the service providers, make open mists appropriate for little and medium size organizations.
While Aderemi A., Feyisetan.O [9] presented a list of security issues that influence cloud computing and proposed the utilization of Homomorphic encryption for managing these serious security concerns. This encryption empowers the change of cipher-texts C (m) of message m, to cipher-texts C (f (m)) of a calculation/function of message m, without disclosing the message. An encryption plan can be said to be completely Homomorphic if: where M is the arrangement of plaintexts, represents to any discretionary function and ĸ implies calculation is done without the plaintexts being decrypted. The fundamental weakness with the completely Homomorphic is the
measure of computational and time asset required for their execution. Almulla.S, Yeun.ch, [10] discussed about few difficulties related three data security concerns, which are: integrity, privacy, and accessibility. They presented the current state of authorization, authentication, and evaluating of clients getting to the cloud alongside rising IAM (identity and access management) protocols and benchmarks. IAM give a precise level of security for an organization and information to authorize the client to login with secret word through a great deal of procedures. Additionally, gives protection to the clients' data and activities.
to know stakeholder and organizations requirements. These solutions are: discovering the key cloud provider by finding the right cloud supplier, distinctive vendors have diverse cloud IT security and information administration, cloud vendor should be well established, has experience, benchmarks and regulation, so there is no any chance for the cloud vendor closing, obvious and clear contract with the cloud vendor, cloud vendors ought to give great recovery facilities.
B. Data and Service Availability Risk
Zissis, D. Lekkas [13] defines availability as the ability of an authorized user to access the system and use it on demand. The system must continue its operations even in the likelihood of a security rupture. Accessibility incorporates information, and even the equipment is being accessible to approved clients upon interest. Utilizing clients from equipment foundation requests produces an overwhelming dependence on the pervasive system's accessibility. The system is now troubled with information recovery and handling. The cloud proprietor needs to ensure that data and data handling are accessible to customers upon interest. Cloud computing administrations show a substantial dependence on the asset bases and arrange accessibility at all times. M. Caroll. , A. van der Merwe [14] described in their paper the different mitigation controls that will help in managing the availability of data and services risk of the cloud computing. It stated that sufficient back up must be taken by the cloud service provider and they should keep a proof of the sufficiency of restoring strategies such as guaranteeing the exact, fulfillment and auspicious recuperation of information. In addition, organizations ought to procure more than one supplier's putting forth all the while and copy information crosswise over them to accomplish sufficient excess. At long last, transfer speed rate and Internet network impediments ought to be examined before considering moving applications and information into the cloud, and also controlling the choice of a suitable administration supplier. To mitigate this risk, the organization must make sure to:
1. Remove complexity to enable faster, and more efficient and effective response to downtime and also to enable an easier view of what issues cause downtime.
2. Guarantee that the supplier planned the administration with adequate limit and numerous administration sources to confine blackouts.
3. Require an administration level that concurs with the supplier with contractual punishments for not exactly satisfactory accessibility execution levels.
4. Ensure that characterized level of accessibility is satisfied for business purposes.
5. Ensure that the administration supplier has a dynamic reinforcement project and recuperation arrangement.
6. Having an affirmation that administration supplier recuperation arrangement is tried frequently.
7. Fitting execution and attainable options for administrations amid a blackout.
8. Perform risk analysis: Evaluate the risks to your organization in the event of a cloud outage. Determine the
critical assets of your organization. What are the chances that your company might suffer a downtime? How will it impact your company’s bottom line? What mitigation strategies or plans do you have in place to reduce the downtime? These are some of the key aspects that need to be considered and addressed while using a cloud platform.
9. Determine how much downtime costs you: It is important to determine how much each minute of downtime costs your business. Once you have an insight of the costs related to downtime, you could get a better understanding of further investments in business infrastructure and IT resources.
10. Have both on premise and cloud services in place: Avoid downtime by not outsourcing everything to the cloud. On premise solutions still offer some significant benefits to organizations. Although cloud services are extremely popular and enticing, it is important to keep in mind that they offer standard services. If you need any specialized service, probably the cloud service providers will not be able to provide you that. You will need to have in-house IT resources and staff.
IV. DISCUSSION
In [4] [7] today’s business world with the amount of cost increasing and a huge storage space that needed for data exchange; they need an affordable technology more than ever; Cloud can be as great opportunity to add value to the business. The main reasons that make cloud computing essential to the business are to keep up with new technologies that have been used in the market. Also, the need to reduce the cost that have been spend in hardware and the expenses for storage, software updates, management and the need to communicate with suppliers, customers and other business partnerships, and updating information all the time. Finally, business companies have to differentiate themselves from the competitors so they attend to use cloud computing in their activities to increase the profit and to stay in the competition, they must choose the best service providers which are numerous in the market such as: IBM, eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo; each one of these providers offer multiple features within their clouds. In addition, they offer several internet consumer services such as: e-mail, social networking, and internet using cloud.
from several ways for example: maximizing the profit, coping with technological advances, and building better business relations. So we can summarize these benefits as: (1) decreasing costs, (2) reducing the amount of space, equipment, and energy that are needed to run the same business, (3) more effective and cheaper than the traditional way, (4) increasing profit, building better business relations, (5) keeping up with the technological advances, (6) providing standardized and lower cost services, and (7) reducing the number of employees that they must hire. As a result Amazon achieved $2.08 billion in 3rd Q in 2015. It was reported $521 million for the quarter, compared with the 3rd Q in 2014 which was $98 million, so the growth rate is about 78%. In Google App Engine which is a portfolio of cloud computing produces by Google, which is offering hosting on the same supporting infrastructure that Google uses internally for end-user products like Google Search & YouTube, Technology Business Research Analyst Firm estimates that Google's cloud business generated $97 million in the 4th Q of 2012 and $31 billion in the year. TBR believes Google's cloud business grew 83% year-over-year. Finally, Microsoft Azure which is ―a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters‖ [16]. They achieve several benefits which are: more than one million SQL databases, 13 billion authentications per week, and more than 30 trillion storage objects. So many companies achieve high percentage of growth in providing cloud-computing services in 2nd Q of 2014 such as: Microsoft 164%, IBM 86%, Google 47% [4] [15].
From clients perspectives there are several companies that achieved their goals from using cloud computing technology, MHI (Manufactured Housing Institutes); they faced some problems which were related to their budget in order to acquired full IT infrastructure which includes (several servers, applications and software purchase, licensing, and the continuous maintenance. So they dealt with Cetrom cloud computing service provider to overcome the problem, they used IaaS model, which delivered fully outsourced services. Finally, the results were: high flexibility in the work way for employees because they could access from anywhere at any time and of course that impacted on their productivity, cutting the budget of IT expenses, and saving more than 20,000$ annually.
Another success story [17] is the Automobili Lamborghini. The site of this organization was facilitated on an obsolete framework. Transmission limit was not progressed and the organization saw that the maintenance was not sensible. In addition, the old site framework was not scalable, and that kept the organization away from supporting new activities online and what's more the increasing visitor’s numbers to the website. Lamborghini should have been online with a new website in a very short time period.
Lamborghini considered three possible circumstances before working with Amazon Web Services: (1) an on-needed server farm, which was very expensive; (2) a close-by encouraging supplier, but without offering scalability; or (3) cloud computing. The organization picked it required the flexibility, adaptability, and cash saving points of
interest of cloud computing, and they chose Amazon in light of the way that is considered by business experts to have the best IaaS stage accessible. Lamborghini had the capacity misuse the AWS self-service way to deal with manage quickly design and realize another structural engineering plan that could scale up or down to meet workload demands. The organization used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudFront. The site is composed on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with TYPO3. Lamborghini found that AWS gave every single required apparatus anticipated that would collect high available, secure, and adaptable foundation, and used the AWS Architecture Center for execution direction and best practices.
It just took Lamborghini a few days to set up the change and test environment. The webpage went online in less than one month and had the ability to support peak movement—a 250% burst in guests—related to another item dispatch. Lamborghini planned to use Amazon CloudFront for element cintent and Amazon Route 53 to improve DNS clarity. The association is in like manner considering the utilization of Adobe Flash Media Server running on AWS.
The manager of digital marketing at Automobili Lamborghini, Roberto Ciacci, depicts the advantages of utilizing AWS like this: "We diminished the expense of our infrastructure by half, while in the meantime accomplishing better performance and scalability. Today our opportunity to-market is near zero‖.
We can summarize the cloud computing as following [18]:
Being Responsive such as entering and exiting markets quickly and cost effectively.
Being connected by offering services to the end users independently with their locations or the type of their devices. Cloud computing offers easy access for the end user from different locations at any time; which results in collaboration growth due to the easiness of accessing and modifying shared files and documents. Being specialized, any company wants to gain the
competition so they need to differentiate themselves more than their competitors in the market. For example to achieve the competition they must focusing on their core expertise.
Saving Money by reducing the investments in stand-alone servers or software. Cloud computing allows companies to save on licensing fees and eliminate the overhead costs of storage and software updates. Saving money is considered the biggest benefit from cloud computing especially to small companies and third world countries that suffer from lacking on the resources of IT services and cannot cope with IT revolutions in their location.
Being Friendly to Environment because it takes fewer computer resources‖ the only one that are truly needed‖ to compute and it saves energy.
Being Scalable: Cloud computing instances are deployed automatically when needed. End users pay only for applications or data storage they need. In addition, cloud computing is elasticity because it is scaled to meet the end users changing IT system demands.
Adaptive infrastructure that has high flexibility, that several users can share it in different ways ―multiple purpose infrastructure"
Can expand: the cloud can adjust and store huge amount of data with unlimited storage space that is compared to physical computers. In addition, it is possible now that cloud computing can deliver services and applications that were not possible before. High Performance because systems are employing distributed architectures, which offer a high speed of computations. The service provider’s must ensure that the services are delivered at specific time to the end user.
V. CONCLUSION
Cloud computing is exceptionally appealing environment for business world in term of giving the required resources and services in an extremely financially savvy way. In any case, before an organization chooses to move to the cloud, it is imperative to comprehend what, why, how and from whom. Not all cloud computing providers are the same. The quality of services offered differs colossally, so we recommend that the organization should investigate the market thoroughly, with a clearly characterized set of prerequisites at the top of the priority list.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Special thanks to Dr. Fatmah Baothman for her guidance and support.
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