Cloud computing is a huge shift from the traditional way of information storage. The low cost incurred during setting up a cloud storage is a plus point for all organizations. There are three types of cloud services namely infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Apart from the types of cloud services, there is a classification of cloud based on deployment procedure. Three types of deployment procedure is present; they are public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud (Sun et al. 2012). The main goal is to provide fast accessing time for all user request and to provide good security measures to the data stored on the cloud.
The companies who provide the services stay strong on their point that the data in safe and secure in their servers. The users are paying them to take care of their data, which is met by the company. As the data is accessible from many locations the users fear for the safety of their data. The problem was removed by the use of proper two-step verification and authentication mechanism.
The report details the work done by Apple on their cloud service – iCloud. There is discussion on the mobile platform applications used to implement iCloud on the mobile devices. The source of their business intelligence, improvement of their decision-making and smart technologies, drawbacks faced and their procedure for effective big data analysis.
Cloud computing as a new technology has been adopted by many organizations for the benefit of the data processing ability. The organizationtaken into concern, iCloud is a cloud service provided by Apple Inc. The service was made to provide data storing availability to the users of Apple devices. The data ranges from documents, music, video and system settings, which can be accessed by the user on other devise running macOS, iOS or Windows (Sukumar and Ferrell 2013). The data can be directly shared with other users and restore settings of a device when the original device lost or stolen. The service can directly backup data onto the cloud wirelessly. The front-end application present on the device is named AirDrop. Apple also signed on a deal to get help from google to use its cloud for partial data storage of the company.
Data stored on the cloud become easy to access for the user from any mobile digital platform device (Kudyba 2014). This removes the idea of storing data on the device. Space can be freed up with such technology that can be used by the user for storing sensitive information. Apple has also provided the ability of apple-based application to use the cloud to store the applications data for seamless synchronization. There are any services offered by iCloud:
Storing of such user specific data helps them in increasing their database to produce user specific data. Such data can be used by other applications to show specific data. The data store is not from just one user. There are thousands of users across the globe using the service (Jenkins and Marler 2016). Such huge amount of data give rise to the Big Data concept.When Apple Inc. first announced the concept of iCloud, people thought that now it would not matter if someone had a 16GB or the 32GB model of the device. Prices varied for devices with higher storage space.
The difference between a 16 GB model and 32 GB of an iPad was $15. The price difference between an iPad and an iPhone was huge. Such price difference occurs due to use user’s way of using. Bigger the screen size higher is the price of the device. With the use of iCloud, this could be altered a bit. A low capacity device can be of the same usage as a larger capacity device (Edge and O’Donnell 2016). On the other hand, it can be seen that iCloud storage space is high. After a certain amount of storage space user required to buy storage spaces to store more data.
iCloud has mobile platform integration which is in the form of applications installed in the Apple devices. The following applications are there:
Many people opt for iCloud because of the added facility of mobile integration. Some of the most notable document editing software’s like LotusLive, Office 365 or Google App for Business all lack the ability of mobile integration.
Big data is information with huge volume, velocity and variety that has the requirements of high specificities technology to transform it into usable values. Several research studies has suggested that big data can help in knowledge improvement of decision-making (Fuchs, Höpken and Lexhagen 2014). Taking abstract information from the data and transforming it into feasible information can improve knowledge management and decision making.
Apple’s iCloud has faced much criticism, but has put forward an effort to improve it. They have focused their thought on the back end integration and still needs support. Apple has already bought two big data analyst companies to provide support to their analytics related to iCloud service. The iCloud service face a leak recently which caused the services to drop for an extended period of time (Edge Jr and Smith 2015). Apple has announced that the company will now be putting forth their own television service, but has still not announced their link with the iCloud leak.
Apple has thought to deploy effective big data analysis to free up data trapped in a user’s data that is less frequently used. Big data as a global thing increases two fold every year. Apple has a secretive way of implementing their big data analysis. Unlike Google, Apple does not share with others. They could use the big data collected from the user devices to implement smart ways on how to improve their applications. They can also test new application on the techniques the application on their devices are used. Apple uses Teradata technology to store their big data. Apparently, they are the fastest customer to reach Petabyte.
Apple not only specializes in mobile devices and tablets, their recent launch of their wearable technology named Apple Watch has also helped the organization to collect data from the users. They can explore new territory in the art of creating better devices with the big data they have already collected from the watches. Data collected from the device range from heartbeat, walking distance, eating habit. These data can be used to analyze the user’s health and can be used to detect disease traits in an individual.
Apple has joined hands with IBM and has started to implement big data analysis of the data collected from the wearable devices (Diebold 2012). They are targeting to make a better lifestyle for the people. Health related applications with the analysis of big data to be used with the Apple Watches are bring produced.
The main challenge that any data storing device or service has is the topic of data security. How secure is the data of a person, which is stored on the cloud? Is the data safe in the hands of the cloud service? Free space on the device being a plus point, the point of data security is often given a blind eye by the user. No device or service is safe from being hacked. In August of 2014, iCloud got hacked and 500 celebrity images were leaked on the internet (Walters 2014). The hackers exploited the backdoor factor of giving the user’spassword an unlimited amount of time. This factor made the hacking easy for the hackers.
Hackers used phishing and brute force attack on the username and password section of the authentication process to get into the users account. A fake email was created to exploit information from the victim. The images were extracted long before they were leaked into the public (Oestreicher 2014). The images were leaked on two image hosting websites: 4chan and Reddit.
The leak prompted the users of iCloud to question the security measure of the service. They did not feel safe anymore to store data on the cloud. This also made the non-users question the same for other cloud services. Apple later in a press release reported that the images were leaked due to a very large target attack using exploitation of username, password and security questions (Gundecha and Liu 2012). The iCloud is impenetrable due to its two-step verification access. The problem arose as most of the users use the same username and password for all sites, which made it easy to get hold of the credentials.
Big data is worthless if it is not correctly organized. The process of breaking down the data acquired is done in five steps. The five steps are divided into two categories: data management and analytics. Data management deals with the searching and storing of all types of data (Assunção et al. 2015). Analytics does the work of analyzing the acquired data so that intelligence can be acquired for decision-making. Big data analysis is done on different types of data in different approach.
All data acquired from the Apple devices are stored in an auxiliary server with RDBMS structured database. For the successful evaluation of the data, the collected information must have consistence, have round the clock availability and partition tolerance during breaking up of the data.
Conclusion
To conclude this report, all software’s in today’s market use cloud computing in one way or the other. With the help of cloud computing a developer can create new applications, store and backup data, start hosting new websites, send application updates over the air and analyze data to produce predictable results. Cloud security is a slow evolving sub domain of basic computer security, information security and network security. It consists of technological policies and controls deployed to provide protection to the data, software applications and infrastructure of the cloud server. Several security issues are associated with cloud computing. Before taking up a cloud server, vendor a user should make seven specific issues. They are privileged user access provision, data location, regulatory compliance, data recovery, data segregation, long-term viability and investigative support. iCloud from Apple has come a long way to help people save their data on a cloud server.
From the above report, it can be seen that iCloud though a useful application should be used with care. Sensitive information should be kept at ones risk. To combat all the bad publicity Apple has received through the days, they need to make sure that such incident do not happen again in the future. There is discussion on the mobile platform applications used to implement iCloud on the mobile devices. To provide better security measure to their cloud servers should be their first priority. Apple being a company with huge resources should put effort in initiating the process of having better security for their cloud servers and mobile digital service platform.
References
Assunção, M.D., Calheiros, R.N., Bianchi, S., Netto, M.A. and Buyya, R., 2015. Big Data computing and clouds: Trends and future directions. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 79, pp.3-15.
Chan, J.O., 2014. Big Data Customer Knowledge Management. Communications of the IIMA, 14.
Chen, D., & Zhao, H. (2012, March). Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud computing. In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International Conference on (Vol. 1, pp. 647-651). IEEE.
Diebold, F.X., 2012. A Personal Perspective on the Origin (s) and Development of’Big Data’: The Phenomenon, the Term, and the Discipline, Second Version.
Edge Jr, C.S. and Smith, W., 2015. Apple Deployment Services. In Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide (pp. 479-491). Apress.
Edge, C. and O’Donnell, D., 2016. iCloud Security. In Enterprise Mac Security (pp. 361-373). Apress.
Fuchs, M., Höpken, W. and Lexhagen, M., 2014. Big data analytics for knowledge generation in tourism destinations–A case from Sweden. Journal of destination marketing & management, 3(4), pp.198-209.
Gandomi, A. and Haider, M., 2015. Beyond the hype: Big data concepts, methods, and analytics. International Journal of Information Management, 35(2), pp.137-144.
Gundecha, P. and Liu, H., 2012. Mining social media: a brief introduction. In New Directions in Informatics, Optimization, Logistics, and Production (pp. 1-17). Informs.
Jenkins, B. and Marler, J.S., 2016. iCloud NLIT (No. SAND2016-4029C). Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States).
Kudyba, S., 2014. Big data, mining, and analytics: components of strategic decision making. CRC Press.
Kwon, O., Lee, N. and Shin, B., 2014. Data quality management, data usage experience and acquisition intention of big data analytics. International Journal of Information Management, 34(3), pp.387-394.
Oestreicher, K., 2014. A forensically robust method for acquisition of iCloud data. Digital Investigation, 11, pp.S106-S113.
Rich, J. and Bell, D., 2014. How to do everything: ICloud. McGraw-Hill Education.
Sukumar, S.R. and Ferrell, R.K., 2013. ‘Big Data’collaboration: Exploring, recording and sharing enterprise knowledge. Information Services & Use, 33(3-4), pp.257-270.
Sun, X., Gao, B., Fan, L. and An, W., 2012, June. A cost-effective approach to delivering analytics as a service. In Web services (icws), 2012 ieee 19th international conference on (pp. 512-519). IEEE.
Walters, R., 2014. Cyber attacks on US companies in 2014. The Heritage Foundation, 4289, pp.1-5.
Essay Writing Service Features
Our Experience
No matter how complex your assignment is, we can find the right professional for your specific task. Contact Essay is an essay writing company that hires only the smartest minds to help you with your projects. Our expertise allows us to provide students with high-quality academic writing, editing & proofreading services.
Free Features
Free revision policy
$10Free bibliography & reference
$8Free title page
$8Free formatting
$8How Our Essay Writing Service Works
First, you will need to complete an order form. It's not difficult but, in case there is anything you find not to be clear, you may always call us so that we can guide you through it. On the order form, you will need to include some basic information concerning your order: subject, topic, number of pages, etc. We also encourage our clients to upload any relevant information or sources that will help.
Complete the order form
Once we have all the information and instructions that we need, we select the most suitable writer for your assignment. While everything seems to be clear, the writer, who has complete knowledge of the subject, may need clarification from you. It is at that point that you would receive a call or email from us.
Writer’s assignment
As soon as the writer has finished, it will be delivered both to the website and to your email address so that you will not miss it. If your deadline is close at hand, we will place a call to you to make sure that you receive the paper on time.
Completing the order and download