The Department of Spatial Information

Questions: The Department of Spatial Information (DSI) has considered your assessment of the deployment model, risk management and security issues for the Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS). They have decided that they need an additional assessment on the technical management and the SLA. You have been assigned the task of providing DSI Executive Management with an assessment of the management requirements and the provisions of the SLA for the chosen cloud vendor. You are to: 1. Discuss the requirements for remote administration, resource management and SLA management. It may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjans operational checklists for DSIs OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 2. Discuss briefly how you will consider application resilience, backup and disaster recovery for your chosen provider in relation to OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 3. Use Erls SLA guidelines to assess the SLA for your chosen provider. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 4. Provide a covering one to two page executive summary of these two assessments to DSI Executive Management and summarise the major opportunities and risks that have been identified in your assessments. Answers: Executive Summary Department for Spatial Information was primarily responsible for publicizing spatial information into the public domain in its documented formats. The problem, however, was faced when it was needed to distribute the documents to many people when they demanded the information. To make the distribution option faster and easier so that information transfer can be achieved through the web, cloud computing was an option that was considered and which could solve the purpose. Furthermore, cloud computing would also give the organization ability to have a real time visibility into the organizations systems. This paper primarily explores the idea of making use of a cloud for the purpose of DSI and its aim was to apprehend the operational requirement and feasibility of the company while adapting to the cloud computing platform for all or some of its significant operations. For this purpose, this report mainly explores the case of Department for Spatial Information which was planning to migrate its current IT infrastructure and operations to a cloud system for which purpose the AWS cloud services by Amazon was studied to figure out whether it was capable of fulfilling the needs of this organization in regards to the SLA and operational requirements of this company. For the study, the PaaS deployments model was selected for the case as it was decided in last assessment of the DSI. To check the cloud services appropriateness, AWS cloud service was explored and judged best on its operational parameters. It included exploration the operational checklist for assessment and adoption of Amazons Service Level Agreements as well as its AWS services. Most of the basic operations needed to run cloud computing successfully in an enterprise environment were found to be diploid properly. These included load balancing, storage recovery, elastic storage, access management etc. All of these features and requirements were available and functional in the event of AWS, when implemented in DSI. SLAs were assessed with the help of parameters like security, reliability, ethical codes etc. Basis assessment it is observed that Amazon has taken all the measures to take care of the requirements of SLAs. Also its track record of having consumer-centric approach along with customer friendly policies adopted by the Amazon team is up to the satisfaction. Basis this findings their AWS can be recommended to be right choice for the cloud solution (ITProPortal, 2013). SLA requirement Due to the fact that organization is shifting into cloud computing to manage its recourses, its administrators will need to administer as well as configure the applications remotely through the cloud with the help of certain cloud computing tools and user interface. This can be done by a remote administrations system by supplying a relevant portal that could be used by its administrator for the purpose of managing SLAs and various resources. Also, this system will have specific tools which can be used for modification of online portals feature particularly for customization. Likewise different portals can be created for users and administrators of the company. Administrators would use the same for the purpose of managing its technology architecture and IT resource usage. The users will be able to use certain services, which includes spatial information reports. Establishing this system will require a few formalities and activities to be done. These formalities and activities include: Planning IT resources capacities and provisioning Monitoring all of the access to services based on the cloud both externally and internally Management of access control, user accounts, authorization , authentication mechanism and their security credentials Management of usage costs and leasing Monitoring whether fulfillments are received as per SLAs and Quality of Service Monitoring mechanism specially for tracking service usage, status and its performance Setting up the cloud services Cloud computings configuration Provision of every required IT resources on cloud Access control mechanism to decide levels of access that needs to be given to all levels of users Provision for leasing of the PaaS model for deployment Organization can prepare a checklist that may be used as a tool by the organization for assessing whether all of its needs are adequately addressed for the specific cloud solution which is being deployed. Here in this study, Amazon Web Services is being considered to be used for its cloud computing service. For which following checklist is prepared for enterprise and basic operations: Item Access Management (IAM) and AWS Identity are providing users credentials which are not shared Our Productions AWS accounts are signed for its enterprise support Suitable storage type is deployed for the Amazon Elastic Blocks Store after understanding recovery options and backups In the event of Application components being started, AWS would employ dynamic IP addressing system to function We will be incorporating AWS trusted advisors reports in this reviews Amazon EBS volumes will be used for database requirements and operating system Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) will be backed up in the system time to time by using EBS snapshots Recovery options and procedure of Amazon EC2 is tested at regular interval for failure through AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) All of the applications critical components are arranged across zones by the use of Elastic Load Balancing Sensitive and confidential like authorization key files and embedded instance key pairs are removed We have tested processes used for security, updates and patches for its AMI services, applications and operating systems regularly For the purpose of mapping of DNS along with Elastic Loads Balancing, CNAME records are used Not all primary private keys for its AWS instance shared and adequate access credentials must be used for its operating system Security rules are implemented for group as per the topology of hierarchy Enterprise operations checklist Category Description Accounting and billing Develop an approach to manage accounts and bills Ascertain whether multi accounts will be used and also how billing will be done Deployment and release Development of a strategy for deployment and integration of the releases according to the change management approach and configuration Access and Security Develop strategy for data access, network, console, operating system and management of API Asset Management Development of strategy for tracking and identification of cloud services Application resilience It should be ensured that this solution meets all resilience requirements of the deployed application and also provides high availability Configuration and change Development of a strategy for change and managing configuration Backup It should be ensured that solution either adequately addresses or exceeds its requirements of back up and disaster recovery Management and Monitoring of incidences Integrate resources in the incidence management process and use appropriate monitoring tools Disaster and Backup Applications which are built over a cloud needs to be resilient to any failure such that they are classified separated from the usual failure causes. To ensure this, Amazon EC2 takes help of Elastic Cloud computing model. This model has tools that can be used by its developers to create a solid and resilient framework. There is a consistent need to have a network that is resilient and has high availability. These requirements have only gown over the years due to the face that many critical information and processes have shifted to the cloud. Organizations around the world are looking to significantly minimize the downtime even in the case of any disaster. Amazon for its could services claims tp extend an uptime of close to 99%. Resilience of AWS: Block level storage for volumes of data is allowed by Amazon over Amazons EC2 instances. Each of these volumes is then automatically replicated according to its specific availability zones such that the clients are protected from any component failures. Which means that even in the event of any such failures, high availability is ensured. Backup by AWS: For its cloud services Amazon adequately addresses the need to have backups for its multiple data centers also at remote branches. This is in addition to having whole infrastructures backup at its main data centers maintained by the organization. Each of its sites, for faster recovery options in case of any disaster, contains a storage gateway. Apart from these options, an User endpoint protection system is also provided through its storage gateways which is used for creating its backups with an automated storage system and encryption for its protections, synchronization of data, data duplication and bandwidth throttling, data duplication (Onlinetech.com, 2016). Recovery in the event of a Disaster by AWS: In case of any disaster, AWS gives an option for storage gateway which enables recovery and this contains all duplicated data. This may also contain a compressed version of its server data and this can be accessed via internet. Once these data is recovered, the decryption also can be done in order to recover procedures. The gateway for storage can be migrated into the cloud from AMI directly making the deployment easier in case of any disaster. Its storage gateways connect its software applications to the storage to provide a smooth service through its integrated infrastructures. Also, the direct connection features allow direct connections between the AWS and on-premise storage. Using this strategy has many benefits for organizations such as consistency of connection, increased throughput and reduction in its network costs. AWSs SLA Assessment A SLA i.e. Service Level Agreement is a set of document specifically maintained for declaring and standardizing obligations the rights of both party (service provider and service user) to the contract. Service provider in this case is Amazon. Specific guidelines for SLAs make it necessary to have such contracts in place to have ensured features such as defined levels of its security, reliability and availability of the cloud service, clarity on support mechanism extended by the service provider and defined levels of security. Service providers need to ensure that some basic ethical codes of its conduct are adhered to and this includes honoring of the right and privacy of its clients and display of confidentiality, honesty, discretion, competency and integrity. Amazons AWS SLAs very clearly defines the expected consistency of the system with a promise of 99% uptime monthly in its agreement. This makes its SLA very reliable. They also have a provision of a support center that can be connected to for any cases where the uptime drops below the expected desired levels. As per Amazons policy in its agreement, clouds security and consistency is given very high priority. The developers have also created a security model which allows companies adopting AWS to work under a very secure environment. There are many strength of its AWS SLAs. Some of these are mentioned below: AWS lets its customers have control over network topologies and connections and through provisions of VPS i.e. Virtual Private Cloud and also Direct connects. Its AWS has high capabilities for load balancing for its applications running on cloud through a technique called Elastic Load Balancing and this is metrics-driven AWS also has capabilities for rapid and convenient scaling along with a rich variety of add on solutions and software for customization. There are also many options available across zones to enable data servers at its nearest locations for the clients AWS SLA also provides a few value added services like memory caching, DNS, Content delivery network and relational database etc. Its SLAs, however, also have few drawbacks which might be a concern regarding adapting to AWS cloud. Some of these concerns are: While Amazon makes available all of its information on its websites other documentation procedures, there is no availability of single instance SLA. Their SLAs also dont have any histories version that can make it tough for the companies to take steps and actions in the event of any contractual issues and service violations. In spite of these issues, the reputations of its services are very strong. And Amazon is always committed to accept, learn and also improve its AWS architecture every day. In the event of any mistake in SLAs, they are willing to accept these and help customers in rectifying the impacts of any of these mistakes(Gartner, 2014). Therefore, considering all above explained pros and cons it can be said that Amazons SLA for AWS service is pretty fair agreement especially considering its reputation as well as availability of all documentation which will certainly make it a safe proposal for the company to choose AWS as its cloud service. References Gartner. (2014). Amazon Web Services Bottom-Line Assessment. Gartner. ITProPortal. (2013). Big data: 5 major advantages of Hadoop | ITProPortal.com. mitsm.de, (2016). [online] Mitsm.de. Netsuite.com. (2016). Resource Management, Resource Utilization, Resource Management System - NetSuite. Onlinetech.com. (2016). Benefits of Disaster Recovery in Cloud Computing. Zechmeister, C., Tomic, A., Ravirala, R., Nunn, J. (2014).