Executive Summary

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 Dalbhanjan’s operational checklists for DSI’s 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 Erl’s 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.
 

The main aim of this study is to assess the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that have been outlined by Amazon Web Service (AWS), which is a cloud computing service provider. Deploying an application in Amazon Web Service is usually cost-effective, fast and very simple (easy).

The study mainly focuses on resource administration, resource management, SLA management, application resilience, application backup and disaster recovery and Earl’s guidelines are used to assess SLA in regards to Amazon Web Service (AWS).

The structure of a remote administration is discussed relating this concept to AWS cloud service vendors.  There are various requirements required for an effective remote administration which are equally covered in this context and a close comparison is done to Amazon Web Services. Challenges facing remote administration such as hacking and malicious practices are also overviewed in this research in relation to the case study.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) management and resource management are also discussed at large viewing their structures and relating to Amazon Web Service computing service vendors. Resource management is where resources of the organization are developed effectively whereas Service Level Agreement is where the cloud service vendor makes a deal or contractual policy regarding the level of service they would offer to their clients, failure to which they are penalized. Resources that may be developed include; financial resources, manpower (human skills), or, production resources.

Assessment of Amazon Web Service SLA

This study also summarized the aspect of application resilience and application backup/disaster discovery. This actually, outlined the possible ways in which data can be lost in a cloud computing firm and remedies to such. Amazon Web Service (AWS) was the context in the review and the resiliency of its application in cloud computing service was examined. 

Requirements for a Remote Administration

Remote Administration basically refers to strategies that are well-organized in some procedural manner to help control a number of computing devices from a central location. With the help of installed programs from a host or server, one is able to control these computing devices from the server. In order to effectively run such an administration, a company needs to be aware of hacking and malicious practices that may be surrounding them and come up with necessary precautions to such (Amazon, 2015, p. 97).

For a successful remote administration, the organization may require the following;

1. System Software

This is actually, the software that will enable such control from the host/server. The interconnected computers within a region or a nation need to a server from where their operations can be closely monitored. Thus, it would be necessary that system software is installed on the server or host computer.

1. Internet connection

An internet connection that may be either on TCP/IP or Local Area Network (LAN) is crucial for a successful and operational remote control/ administration. The host server and the computing devices to which remote administration is to be done need to be connected to a stable internet connection since they will be having some communications will be done on the web (Raimondi, Skene, & Emmerich, 2008, p.234). 

Service Level Agreement (SLA) generally, refers to a contractual agreement that exists between a cloud service vendor and their potential customers. This contract postulates the standards and levels of service that the customers should expect from their cloud servicer vendor or provider. The SLA of Amazon Web Service clearly defines and outlines the customer’s expectation of the service level from the cloud computing firm. DSI needs to consider the provisions of Amazon Web service SLA before using its cloud computing platform.

For an SLA management, there are basic requirements for such a Service Level Management to work effectively these may include;

1. Order of raising issues or problems

A well-organized SLA should clearly define how it will require its clients to report the problems that may arise as a result of their policies. A channeled procedure should be provided in such an agreement so that the clients can actually make their complaints or reports in the right manner.

1. Description

Requirements for a Remote Administration

This means that Amazon Web Service (AWS) needs to clearly outline clearly outline the cloud services that they will be offering to their clients with a clear description of the service levels they should expect.

Resource Management requires refers to adjustments or modifications that are done to the organizational resources to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in development. Such resources may include IT, financial resources, and resources of production. The basic requirement for a resource management is a resource management platform or software that will ensure effective operations. This may comprise an asset management checklist based on the Morad and Dalbhanjan’s asset management operational checklist (Patel, Ranabahu, & Sheth, 2009, p.113).

Application Resilience

Basically, Application Resilience refers to the application’s ability to face challenges and problems of its components but still provide the best services.

The resiliency of an account would be based on;

1. Scalability

This is the responsiveness of an application to changes. Amazon Web Service should aim at providing applications that are highly responsive to change in technology or any updates that may be required without posing a challenge to users. 

1. Security Issues

The issue of privacy and security is one that should be handled with much care. Amazon Web Service should ensure their services are continuously managed to avoid security issues either from hacking or malicious practices. (Liu, Ngu, & Zeng, 2004, p.123)

Data backup involves archiving or keeping of data to enable access to such original data in case of an event of data loss either accidentally or due to the corruption of files.

Disaster recovery, on the other hand, refers to methods and strategies put in place by the cloud service providers like Amazon Web Service to prevent loss of information that is considered material to the company. Disaster recovery measures may have the following qualities;

• They should be detective measures. This means they should be able to discover or detect the existence of unwanted items such as computer virus that may cause harm to the information (Ercolani, 2013, p.119)
• The measures should be able to prevent the systems from experiencing such disasters.
• The disaster recovery measures need to be corrective in the quickest way possible once the systems have experienced challenges or breakdown.

These are standard guidelines theta have been put in place to govern SLAs that are being formulated between the cloud computing companies and their clients. Amazon Web Service tends to deploy these standards in order to provide the best services to its clients.

Some of the guidelines include;

• Availability of the cloud computing should be outlined on the SLA
• Quality of services offered should be clearly outlined on the SLA
• Security levels for which a client will be a beneficiary should be outlined in the SLA 

This policy is outlined in AWS Customer Agreement on the usage of Cloud Front services. It involves the determination of content distribution. Amazon S3 SLA

This describes the policy usage of Amazon Simple Storage Service known as Amazon S3. It describes the mechanisms of data protection strategies or mechanisms.

Amazon Web Service is an efficient and a reliable cloud computing service provider. The decision of DSI to use AWS cloud computing platform in launching its OSDS will be carried with a lot of opportunities and benefits (Ercolani, 2013, p.167). However, there are also risks that are associated with this platform. The risks and opportunities may include;

• There is an opportunity to operate the platforms on a very low or reduced cost.
• There is a risk of data loss or lose of information due to hacking or malicious practices.
• One has an opportunity to access the computing services easily whenever there is the need to use them.
• There is the risk of losing business continuity. This may result if the platform causes a failure that may be technical to tackle.  

References

Amazon, E. C. (2015). Amazon web services. 

Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., … & Zaharia, M. (2010). A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 50-58.

Casalicchio, E., & Silvestri, L. (2013). Mechanisms for SLA provisioning in cloud-based service providers. Computer Networks, 57(3), 795-810.

Liu, Y., Ngu, A. H., & Zeng, L. Z. (2004, May). QoS computation and policing in dynamic web service selection. In Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters (pp. 66-73). ACM.

Ercolani, G. (2013). Cloud Computing Services Potential Analysis. An integrated model for evaluating Software as a Service. Cloud Computing, 77-80.

Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service level agreement in cloud computing.

Raimondi, F., Skene, J., & Emmerich, W. (2008, November). Efficient online monitoring of web-service SLAs. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering (pp. 170-180). ACM.

Subashini, S., & Kavitha, V. (2011). A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud computing. Journal of network and computer applications, 34(1), 1-11.