Case Study 2: Cloud Computing

CIS 500

Dr. Janet Durgin

June 2, 2013

Case Study 2: Cloud Computing As we know, Ericsson is the number one supplier in modern advancements and support to operators of telecommunication every cell phone carrier has some form of Ericsson technologies. Ericsson has its roots in Sweeden and its footprint or influence stretches over 175 countries and has more then ninety thousand employees. Ericsson wanted to advance from the level they were already operating on so they decided to grab hold of the future and look for a cloud computing solution. Ericsson needed a high leveled infrastructure to maintain their business and Amazon’s AWS was able to meet that demand. Due to this Ericsson was able to immediately benefit from Amazon’s resources. They had the capability to implement things like new applications and automatic software updates instantaneously due to the fact that they could move up and down to keep up with demands of customers or because it was a business requirement. “AWS enables us to avoid certain operational ‘keeping the lights on’ distractions so we can maintain our focus on core business strategies” (Amazon Web Services, 2012). Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a type of web service that lets users use virtual machines that vary in sizes for reasonable monthly costs. According to Amazon Web Services, “Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios” (Amazon Web Services, 2012). Through the use of this rented technology users can use a variety of different operating systems to help them develop on multiple platforms away from common faults that may occur. Amazon S3 is basically a backup storage that users pay for based on the amount of data that they have to have saved in this environment. “It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers” (Amazon Web Services, 2012). Amazon S3 is made to be flexible so that any functionalities and procedures can be added with ease. Rightscale is simply a go-between in your cloud infrastructure and your applications. Rightscale Cloud Management has a multicloud platform in which it acts as a “universal remote to conveniently access your public, private, and hybrid cloud” (Rightscale Cloud Management, 2013). This type of management supplies proficient things like configuration framework, multicloud marketplace, automation engines, and governance controls. Due to the fact that this is portable it gives a business the freedom and flexibility to not become locked into a sole provider. Cloud based services are usually painted to sound like rainbows and unicorns and everything is happy, however there are numerous security concerns to this technology and data storage solution. First and foremost is the storage location. The location that you send your data to may not be in the United States it could be anywhere and how would you know? Ask. When users create the agreement you must read the fine print and if allowed then specify where it is acceptable to store the data at and if there are multiple locations to choose from and have this included in the user agreement. Because the cloud solution is an agreement between multiple users it needs to be reviewed for common user concerns to include data segregation, recovery, and user permissions. Data segregation or identifiability is making sure that your data is able to be distinguished as your data. While data recovery is the ability to retrieve the data if something were to happen and the last security concern would be user permissions or user levels and