Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
about the maintenance of infrastructure when on cloud. Though, users have to
keep a tab on application's health and status. This can be done with the help of
cloud management tools available. Chef and Puppet are specially built
considering this requirement. These tools help maintain the required status of an
application. All the leading cloud service providers support cloud management
through APIs, CLIs and web consoles. For example, AWS provides Java APIs
while Azure supports .Net APIs.
To discuss the maintainability an experience of RHEL migration on AWS
cloud has been discussed in detail in subsequent section.
b)
Recommendation:
Though there are bunch of APIs and CLIs available with each
of the cloud vendor; it is easy to manage and maintain the infrastructure on cloud
with the help of cloud management tools.
1.4
Transparency and Control
It is the extent to which the cloud vendor allows its user to control the infrastructure.
a)
Description:
Transparency in cloud's perspective is the capability to have a view
at day-to-day activity of cloud infrastructure or point-in-time status and health of
the servers. Users would like to have full control over the servers which are
running under their account and hosting their applications. AWS implementing
IaaS gives the user right amount of control over the servers to suffice the purpose.
Azure on the other hand being PaaS does not provide that level of transparency
and control at the hardware level.
b)
Recommendation:
If transparency and control over infrastructure is too major a
deciding factor, data-centre is a way to go. AWS provides some control over the
infrastructure which should suffice in most of the cases.
1.5
Security
It is the extent to which the cloud vendor supports security and reliability for cloud
environment.
a)
Description:
One of the deciding factors for any organization while choosing
cloud environment is its security and reliability. There are numerous regulations
appertain to the storage and use of data, including Payment Card Industry Data
Security Standard (PCI DSS), ISO, the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to name a few.
Beside this there are privacy issues that arise from virtualization. AWS runs
the server on virtualized environment and this brings in the issue that could arise
from multi-tenancy. Organizations are skeptical about sharing the same hardware
with multiple users. Though there are few options such as virtual private cloud
and virtual private network that helps resolve the data security and network
security to some level.
b)
Recommendation:
There are provisions that could help resolve the security issues
to some extent, but if the nature of data in question is very sensitive it is better to
keep it on on-premise servers.
