Introduction to Cloud Delivery Models

Question:

Propose a Mobile based Cloud Computing Services to Dunedin Hospital (Radiology Department). You should propose them two different providers. One should be Cost-effective and other should be High-end provider.

Heroku

There are different cloud delivery models that are present comprising of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Heroku is a cloud platform that provides the organization with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model of cloud for building, delivering, monitoring and scaling the cloud applications. The cloud-based services for Dunedin Hospital can be designed using this platform. The platform makes use of managed container system along with the use of integrated data services and a very strong ecosystem for the deployment and execution of the applications. The developer experience that is associated with Heroku is app-focused for the tasks of delivery of the software and it also provides integration with the popular development applications of the present times. The cloud services associated with the hospital will be possible to be executed in the dynos which are smart containers based on the reliable application runtime. The developers can deploy the codes in different languages, such as Ruby, Python, Java, PHP and many more (Devcenter, 2017). The cloud services of the hospital will be easy to execute as an outcome. The language and system stacks that are associated with this cloud service provider are always monitored and evaluated with ease. These are also upgraded regularly. Manual intervention will also not be required in this case. The cloud platform provides the developers with an opportunity to focus on the delivery services without worrying about the cloud infrastructure in this case. There are popular tools like GitHub which can be used for the purpose of application integration. The dashboard present in the cloud platform enhances the visibility and performance of the application. There are many add-ons that are also present in this cloud platform which can be used by the hospital as per their requirements (Capterra, 2017). These add-ons are the third party services which can be immediately extended to enhance the functionality of the cloud services. Operational experience that is provided by this cloud platform is one of its distinguishing characteristics. The task of troubleshooting can be performed with ease to avoid the defects and bugs associated with any of the cloud based service. In case of enhanced response or throughput time or any other defect, there are alerts that can be launched for scaling up the application and services. Auto-scaling is one of the unique features provided by this cloud platform. All of these features will make sure that the needs and requirements of the Dunedin hospital are met.

Heroku Cloud Platform for Hospital Cloud Services

List of Advantages

Heroku will provide many advantages to Dunedin Hospital which are as listed and described below.

• The first and the foremost advantage is that the platform is open source in nature and there is no cost that will be required to be spent in this regard.
• Application runtime and all of the associated operations will be completely handled by Heroku and the hospital will not be required to bother about load balancing, logging, configuration tasks etc.
• Scalability and flexibility are the two elements that will come handy with this platform and it will provide the hospital with the ability to scale up and scale down the application as per the requirements.
• PostgreSQL is integrated in this platform for the management and organization of the data and information sets along with the execution of the data related operations (Heroku, 2017).
• There is a built-in monitoring feature that is present in the platform which will allow easy tracking and monitoring of the application metrics.
• There is also a feature of easy code and database roll back that is present which would allow the data handling to be easily done.
• System and language stacks will be continually monitored in the application using smart containers.
• There are also additional add-ons that come along with the platform, such as MongoDB, Treasure Data and many more.

Set of Disadvantages

There are also a number of disadvantages that are associated with Heroku for Dunedin Hospital cloud services.

• Live-support of the application is not very strong which may lead to certain performance issues. In case of Dunedin hospital, performance is one of the prime necessities of cloud based services because of the application and service domain that are required to be provided.
• There is also no option to enhance the CPU performance or RAM storage in this case.
• There is a single point of failure that is present in this platform that can have a direct impact on availability and continuity in case of a security attack.
• There are limited security options that are available in this case. This may lead to the execution of a number of security risks and attacks as a result.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is one of the most popular cloud service provider in the present times. It is a market giant owing to the excellent services and customer support that is provides.

There are a broad range of cloud services that are provided by AWS. These services and products that are provided by AWS include computing services, storage and database solutions, analytical tools and application, networking services, mobile solutions, developer tools, management applications, IoT applications, security solutions along with enterprise applications. The services that are offered by AWS will allow the hospital to operate the cloud services in a faster manner at lower costs with enhanced scalability. The cloud provider is trusted by many of the large market giants and a number of other organizations in the market owing to its features and benefits. There are a large number workloads that are made enabled with AWS that comprise of web and mobile-based applications, data warehousing applications and many more. AWS Management Console is present with all the cloud-based services provided by the cloud platform that keeps track of all the resources that are involved. It provides a simple interface for the execution of cloud based tasks and activities (Awsstatic, 2017). The AWS cloud services can be managed by making use of the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). It is a unified tool for easier management of the tasks. Multiple tasks and activities can be easily handled by using the command line and automated scripts as well.  It is just a matter of seconds that are required for the execution of cloud services with the aid of AWS. There are web service APIs that are involved which make it easier and automatic to scale up or scale down the services and application. There is a complete control of the services as well as the instances that are involved. There is root access that is provided in this case that allows easier interaction and communication. The data management along with rebooting tasks can also be executed with much ease (Varia & Mathew, 2014). 

There are several advantages that will be offered by AWS to Dunedin Hospital. Also, there are a few points that shall be addressed carefully.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Heroku Cloud Services for Hospital Operations

List of Advantages

• Existing and new SaaS application can be easy designed and used with the aid of AWS services. There is management console and high quality documentation that is available for the purpose. This will allow the hospital to easily execute the health services and applications.
• The customer base of AWS comprises of millions of customers and the customer feedback and rating is also positive. As a result, the services that are offered can be trusted to be reliable in nature.
• There is flexible option provided to select the programming language, desired operating system, database, web application platform and likewise. The application can therefore be designed as per the specification of Dunedin Hospital (Aws, 2017).
• There are enhanced security options that are provided and included by AWS. This makes sure that the frequency of the security risks and attacks is very low.
• There are different options that are provided in terms of simple mobile backend, serverless backend for mobile applications, secure enterprise applications and likewise.

Set of Disadvantages

There are a few disadvantages that are associated with AWS services in association with Dunedin Hospital.

• There are multiple pricing models that are associated with AWS that vary on the basis of the type of services that are used. In this case, there may be a few hidden costs that may come up.
• Enterprise-grade support does not come by default. It needs to be added as an additional utility. This may scale up the costs associated with the cloud services.
• There have been a few high profile outages in the past. This may bring down the customer engagement and satisfaction.

The primary cloud based services that will be provided by Dunedin Hospital with the aid of any of the two cloud platforms with include health monitoring services, information management, diagnosis and treatment decision making and many more. The table that has been depicted below provides a comparison between the two platforms on the basis of different parameters. It will make it easier to decide upon the correct choice for the cloud platform to be selected for the hospital. 

Cloud based services and applications are often exposed to security risks and attacks. With the combination of cloud technologies and mobile technologies, the number and types of such risks further increase.

There can be numerous security risks that may take place, such as man in the middle attacks, information breaching and leakage, denial of service attacks, phishing attacks, eavesdropping attacks, malware attacks etc. These attacks can have threat agents as mobile devices, networks, users, databases and many more (Malik & Chaturvedi, 2013). The impact of these attacks can be extremely adverse on the information confidentiality, privacy, integrity and availability.

Dunedin Hospital will need the cloud services for providing health services to the patients and to assist the medical team in the diagnosis and treatment procedures. In case of exposure of this information to the unauthorized entities, the impact can be extremely severe. Also, unavailability of the application will also have serious impacts (Shahzad & Hussain, 2013).

The cloud technologies that have been suggested above have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. However, the one that is recommended for Dunedin Hospital is AWS cloud services. It is because of the reason that the cloud based services of Dunedin Hospital will have a lot many users. It would also be necessary to make sure that the availability of the application is never compromised. The occurrence of security risks and attacks in the application may have legal obligations as well. AWS mobile offers the qualities of scalability, reliability, performance, availability and security. The application cost can be easily managed by the hospital owners.

Security is one of the primary points of concern for the cloud-based services. In case of Dunedin hospital, the executives must make sure that the application security is never compromised. In order to do so, it would be essential to follow an amalgamation of technical, physical and administrative security controls (Ahuja & Zambrano, 2016). Network security shall also be enhanced with the use of anti-denial tools, anti-malware tools and network based intrusion detection systems.

Dunedin hospital cloud based services shall also be marketed and promoted adequately so that the users come to know about the new initiative taken up by the hospital owners. Social media platforms shall be used for this purpose so that more number of users get to known about the application, launch date, set of features and specifications.

References

Ahuja, S., & Zambrano, J. (2016). Mobile Cloud Computing: Offloading Mobile Processing to the Cloud. Computer And Information Science, 9(1), 90. https://dx.doi.org/10.5539/cis.v9n1p90

Aws. (2017). AWS Mobile – The Fastest Way to Build Mobile Apps. Amazon Web Services, Inc.. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://aws.amazon.com/mobile/

Awsstatic. (2017). Overview of Amazon Web Services. D0.awsstatic.com. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-overview.pdf

Capterra. (2017). Heroku Reviews and Pricing – 2017. Capterra.com. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://www.capterra.com/p/158191/Heroku/

Devcenter. (2017). How Heroku Works | Heroku Dev Center. Devcenter.heroku.com. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works

Heroku. (2017). The Heroku Platform as a Service & Data Services | Heroku. Heroku.com. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://www.heroku.com/platform

Malik, S., & Chaturvedi, M. (2013). Privacy and Security in Mobile Cloud Computing: Review. International Journal Of Computer Applications, 80(11), 20-26. https://dx.doi.org/10.5120/13906-1833

Shahzad, A., & Hussain, M. (2013). Security Issues and Challenges of Mobile Cloud Computing. International Journal Of Grid And Distributed Computing, 6(6), 37-50. https://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijgdc.2013.6.6.04

Soares, M., Vrancken, J., & Verbraeck, A. (2011). User requirements modeling and analysis of software-intensive systems. Journal Of Systems And Software, 84(2), 328-339. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2010.10.020

Varia, J., & Mathew, S. (2014). Overview of Amazon Web Services. Media.amazonwebservices.com. Retrieved 12 November 2017, from https://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Overview.pdf