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Section 1: Design Document

There are many reasons why many companies would want to adopt cloud technology and virtualization within their companies. The most significant ones are identified as business performance resourcing, rapid-go-to-market, business agility, as well as, cost reduction. Often, there are no serious reasons why organizations choose to adopt cloud computing given that the decisions always depends on the complex combination of reasons, rather than being based on a single factor. Use of cloud computing can change the risk posture and profile of a company. For example, by companies using public cloud, they will definitely avoid the risk that a large investment in IT resources will not pay off; however, it can introduce security risks because the resources are shared with unknown parties. Conversely, there may be risk of non-compliance and regulation, due to lack of control over where data is stored. The need for using cloud technology within the company is the ability to take advantage of new business opportunities, cost, agility, and productivity.

Cloud computing delivers improved agility because it has on-demand rapid elasticity. For instance, the IT resources can be deployed more quickly and increased as needed to meet demand. This gives opportunities for enterprises to innovate, introduce new products and services, enter new markets, as well as, adapting to changing circumstances. The other reason for the need for the use of cloud technology and virtualization within the company is that, it increases productivity. Cloud technology provides a more productive environment not only for a collaborative working, but also it improves the company’s productivity by enabling participants in a business ecosystem to share processing logic. Cloud computing or technologies create new business opportunities, for example, it can give an enterprise new business opportunities as a provider of cloud services or added services. Companies that excel in quality of its IT can become a public SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) provider. A good example of this is in a case where a company implements a private cloud, has spare capacity, as well as, sells that capacity as public cloud. Cloud computing within the company also cut businesses costs. For example, given the benefits of agility, productivity, and quality that cloud computing have, companies might expect these to be generally more expensive, however, this is not the case; reduced cost is one of the main reasons why many companies are turning to the cloud technologies (Perilli, 2009).

Research has shown that few technologies have affected the IT industry. An example is cloud computing that delivers computing as a service. Part of cloud’s appeal is evidently financial; that is, it allows organizations to shed some of their expensive IT infrastructure (software and hardware) and shifts computing costs to more manageable operational expenses. Cloud computing is not only about purchasing hardware and infrastructure, instead, the companies, as well as, individuals usually compare the cost of on-premise server to the cost of cloud server. In the mind of these entities, the on-premise server is most likely to depreciate itself may be in 3 years to come while the cloud computing server will be treated as a continuous expenditure. Cost savings in hardware infrastructure are relatively easy to quantify. For example, if companies adopt cloud technologies in a public cloud, on-site hardware will be replaced less often and less new hardware has to be purchased. This is significant because it will in turn lead to much-reduced power, less space needed in the data center, as well as, cooling costs. Studies shows that a medium-sized cloud deployments lead to about 62 percent savings within a year compared with an on-premise system. However, for larger cloud deployments, the annual savings may be about 50 percent compared with on-premise implementations (Schwartz, 2013).

Labor cost savings is one of the possible reduction of human capital that can be realized from implementing and virtualization technologies. By off-loading software, application or a platform to a private cloud platform, less time is needed to maintain, administer, as well as, troubleshoot the technologies. For instance, if there is a system administrator who is in charge of about 140 servers, the same system administrator can be in charge or responsible for thousands of cloud –based servers as well (Schwartz, 2013). IT management costs can as well be reduced through automated provisioning. For example, in the cloud, virtual servers are usually provisioned automatically instead of manually. This is significant because it reduces the downtime along with the compliance issues.

The diagram below illustrates how cloud and virtualization technology aligns with the company’s business processes and assist with attainment of organizational goals.

Cloud Provider

Cloud Consumer

Service Orchestration

Resource abstraction and control layer

Physical Resource Layer

Service

Management

PaaS

SaaS

IaaS

The main actors in the above diagram are cloud consumers and cloud provider. A cloud consumer is an individual or organization that acquires and uses cloud products and services, while cloud provider in this case is a person or an organization that are responsible for making a service available to a cloud consumer.

One area concern from many organizations regarding cloud technologies and virtualization is how to trust the infrastructure upon which the data and workloads will be run. As a result, companies who are interested in moving to the cloud and manage their risk profiles should look for Cloud Service Providers that offer security and trust services, as well as, the ability to enforce and audit policy on the data being deployed. A compelling recommendation for solution providers that could help the company secure a firm competitive advantage using cloud and virtual technologies is recommending these firms to advance their server security for physical, virtual, and cloud servers in regards to what enterprises chose to use for storing their information in the cloud. Enterprises should adopt data security that will protect the enterprise applications and data from breaches, as well as business disruptions. This is important because it will help organizations to simplify security operations while enabling regulatory compliance and cloud projects. Another compelling recommendation for solution providers that could help the company secure a firm competitive advantage using cloud and virtual technologies is through automation and self service. Organizations should discover best practices in the cloud and encapsulate those in new procedures for ongoing support, provisioning of resources, as well as, application design. In the case of automation, firms can radically reduce the human cost of IT if they take the advantage of schedule maintenance and provisioning.

Section 2: Revised Project Plan

One of the critical factors for project success is having a well-developed project plan. There are various step approaches to follow when creating a project plan which includes; project description, project objectives, project management plan purpose, project deliverables, project milestones, project Roles and Responsibilities, project scope management, project time management, and many others. In this case, we shall revise the previous project plan while updating the project plan template; from Project Deliverables 3: Database and Data Warehousing Design with at least three new project tasks each consisting five to ten subtasks.

A database is an organized collection of data that can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. Databases are set up so that one set of software programs allows users to access to all. In databases, there are rows and columns which are used to store information. Data warehouse is an electronic storage of a large amount of information, and are stored in a manner that is secure, reliable, easy to manage and retrieve. Usually, data warehouse is the only option for data collection Company that has a huge collection of data. For example, every moment users visit a single page in a website that will generate thousand records to be saved. Some of the new project tasks in project deliverables for Database and Data Warehousing Design include; improving information access, bringing the user in touch with their data, enhancing the quality of decisions, managing schema objects, such as tables, indexes, and material views, managing users and security, as well as, providing cross- function integration.

All the above project tasks in project deliverables for Database and Data Warehousing Design are important and difficult step for designing a software product for the reason that they determine what the user wants, this is because users often are unable to communicate the entirety of their needs, and the information they provide may also be incomplete (Parker, 2012). By managing schema objects, such as tables, indexes, and material views, some of the subtasks include defining alternatives to triggers by defining data version control and management while the subtasks of managing users and security include creating login less users, implementing certificate-based security, as well as defining appropriate database roles and permissions for the users.

References

Perilli, W. (2009). The benefits of virtualization and cloud computing. Retrieved on 18 Feb, 2016 from http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/870217

Parker, J. (2012). Business Requirments vs Functional Requirements. Retrieved on 12 Feb, 2016 from http://enfocussolutions.com/business-requirements-vs-functional-requirements/

Schwartz, P. (2013). Cloud Computing can generate massive savings for agencies. Retrieved on 18 Feb, 2016 from https://fcw.com/microsites/2011/cloud-computing-download/financial-benefits-of-cloud-computing-to-federal-agencies.aspx