Executive Summary

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.
 

Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS) is a suite of web services and applications for the Department of Spatial Information (DSI). DSI has decided to shift OSDS to a cloud provider and the chosen model is  Platform as a Service (PaaS). The major risks that come up in the migration of services to the cloud are to the data protection and information security. Access controls and use of proper authentication and authorization methods can act as important and impactful countermeasures. The report discusses the six components that are necessary in the migration process that is involved with OSDS. Remote administration has a few shortcomings associated with it in terms of multi-platform support and scalability. Resource management can be done with ease through managing the resources at all levels such as top, middle and low. SLA management for OSDS is recommended to be done at the service level. Application resilience focuses on the High Availability requirements that are associated with DSI and OSDS. Data back up and disaster recovery are of prime importance to yield protection to the data and recover the same in case of an attack or loss of the same. Data protection and information security risks are the two prime risks that are associated with OSDS and may result in adverse impacts if the measures to prevent and handle these two are not undertaken with utmost perfection. 

Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS) has to be migrated to a cloud provider. The most applicable model to execute the same is Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS provides the platform and environment to build the applications upon the same. Each and every entity plays a crucial role and a phased approach needs to be followed for achieving the best results out of them.

Remote Administration

Remote Administration is the act of handling and processing the system from any of the remote locations (cbigconsulting.com, 2016). The use of Remote Administration is however, discouraged owing to the shortcomings that it comes with.

There are multiple tools that do not scale properly. It becomes tedious for the administrators to simultaneously work upon the network with varied speeds and that too in a secure manner.

Multi-platform support is another issue that is seen with the implementation of Remote Administration in the architecture. Organizations make use of different operating systems such as Linux, Windows, iOS and many other and all of them need to be supported in an efficient manner. Mobile devices are also being used by most of the organizations and the OS of those devices need support too. Use of varied tools and devices with different platforms and operating systems is difficult to manage by the remote administrator.

Regulatory requirements such as encryption, authentication and access controls also appear as an issue in the implementation of remote administration (sans.org, 2016). 

Resource Management is the second components for OSDS that is required for successful implementation and migration of the services and applications on the cloud. There are multiple resources across various departments that are associated with OSDS. The key resources are as listed below.

• Business owners
• Database admin and team
• Operations head and team
• Development team
• Design team
• Network team
• Network admin
• Support and maintenance team

DSI needs to develop strategies to efficiently mannage resources and other departments. The basic step in achieveing the same is to find answers to the following list of questions.

• Is there an already implemented resource tagging strategy in place?
• What is the internal resource management team that is associated with DSI and how does it link to the overall company model?
• What is the process that is used in the allocation of resources to a particular project or department?
• Are there required metadat and service instances available or need to be included?

SLA is a term for Service Level Agreement and it is a written legal contract that is agreed upon and signed between the service user and the service provider. A service along with all of its aspects is formally defined in this contract. There are a certain particular aspects such as scope, quality and responsibilities that are present in SLA in complete detail. One of the most important feature that is present in SLA is an agreed-upon delivery time. For OSDS, it will also include the time it would be required to completed migrate the services and applications on the cloud provider and also the details on every phase. This would be in terms of percentage that is how much percent of the entire service will be completely migrated in a specified time period. Other details that are defined in SLA are Mean time to failure (MTTF), Mean time between failures (MTBF) and Mean time to repair or recovery (MTTR). It would help in the identification os the parties that would be responsible for handling the failures and dealing with the costs associated with the same.                        

Resource Management

Shared resources is a phenonmenon that is common in case of cloud computing. The most applicable SLA level in case of OSDS would be at the service level (Bose et al., 2011).

The following factors play a major role in designing of SLA for OSDS:

• The services that have been agreed upon between DSI and the cloud provider
• Supply chain management team
• Accurate assignment of roles and responsibilities to the resources
• Complete analysis of the cost and description for each of the component
• Broad level flow chart highlighting the critical features
• Performance indicators (mitsm.de, 2016)

Service Levels Agreements are output based in nature which means that the results that will be recived by the customers would be the subject and source of the agreement. The (expert) service provider can demonstrate their value by organizing themselves with ingenuity, capability, and knowledge to deliver the service required, perhaps in an innovative way. OSDS can also explain the details and specifications of these services agreed with the provider in a specification document.

The major services and details that will be covered in the SLA for OSDS would be as listed below:

• Primary resposible source for all the services along with the secondary points of contact.
• What all services will be covered?
• What would be the time constraints that would apply on these services?
• Will there be any extrenal entities that would be required in the service Completion?
• What will be the design that would be followed and will it apply to all the services or on a particular section of services?
• For every service, the contribution ot be made by DSI and the one to be done by the cloud provider would also be contracted to avoid the disimilarties and differences in opinions later on.

Every application has a set of critical and high on priority requirements. OSDS also has a set of the same which are termed as High Availability (HA) requirements. There needs to be a step-by-step approach to be developed for the complete execution of such requirements. The strategy would include the following:

• A fault tolerant application in cloud that would help in maintenance of availability and reliability of the services
• Adherence to the guidelines
• Applicable and required data storage options
• Architecture of cloud

Storing and managing the huge data is a task in itself and there are Big Data tools that can be utilized for this purpose (Goes, J. 2016).

There is database named NoSQL for performing this task and it also provides additional features such as easy visualizations, flexibility and creation of reports. Predictive analysis on the data to correctly manage and store the same is also possible through NoSQL (Pentaho, 2016).

Mongo DB, Elasticsearcg, CouchDB, AmazonSimpleDB and Terrastore are some of the NoSQL databases that provide good storge and indexing features (Big Data Made Simple – One source. Many perspectives., 2014).

Disaster Recovery (DR) comes in to the picture when the attack or any such event takes place and the data needs to be recovered.

These are the measures that should be adopted to avoid the risks at the first place and recover from the same.

• Preventative – Measures for firsthand security like use of antivirus, firewalls and deployment of physical security guards fall under this one.
• Reactive – They are the ones that are adapted once the event already takes place.
• Detective – Measures such as intrusion detection and motion detection fall in this category of countermeasures
• Administrative – These are used to make the processes adhere to the defined guideleines.

DR, as already stated is the set of processes that is used to recover as much data as possible and is required for maintenance and management of the same. DR would allow the recovery process to be enabled in multiple locations (Kiblin, 2011). Many strategies are present to have an application recovered (aws.amazon.com, 2016). Cloud for disaster recovery is a viable option for DSI both from the financial perspective and from the control perspective as well (Dix, 2016). 

Conclusions – Opportunities and Risks

OSDS needs the components as Remote adminstration, SLA management, data storage and back up along with the disaster recovery during its migration to a cloud provider. Remote administration suffers from a few drawbacks related to scalability and multi-platform support. Resource management is necessary for accurate utilization of resources and their skills. Critical requirements, data storage and recovery also play an important role for OSDS.

Cloud suffers from certain potential and probable risks as well that mainly revolve around data protection and information security. These risks include loss of data, accessing of the data by an unauthorized user, denial of services, attack of malicious software, spoofing, phishing and inadequate due diligence. Such risks possess a threat to the confidentiality, integrity and authneticty of the information, Use of authorizations measures along with proper access controls are mandatory to protect the data belonging to OSDS. The data associated is private and confidential in nature and the landing of the same in unauthorized hands could be extremely adverse for DSI.  (“Risks of cloud computing | Queensland Government”, 2016). 

References

Bose, S., Pasala, A., Ramanujam A, D., Murthy, S. and Malaiyandisamy, G. (2011). 

Big Data Made Simple – One source. Many perspectives. (2014).

Dix, J. (2016). Cloud computing causing rethinking of disaster recovery. 

Goes, J. (2016). How to choose a NoSQL analytics system.

Innotas. (2016). Project Resource Management Benefits | Innotas. 

Executive Summary