Approaches For Office Automation: Structured Approach Vs Pilot Approach

Structured Approach

Various approaches can be implemented for office automation such as Ad hoc approach, Pilot approach and structured approach (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). MetaSoft can use two among these approaches for providing office automation to their staffs. These approaches are structured approach and Pilot approach.

Structured approach

Advantages: The structured approach would provide a huge number of benefits to the organization (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). This is because this approach makes the processes to perform in a sequential manner.

Disadvantages: The structured approach is very time consuming and it produces tons of data, which is usually impossible for the system to handle.

Pilot approach

Advantages: The Pilot approach reduces the risk of errors, failure and delays (Martinez & Pulier, 2015). This approach includes the testing of other processes as well which reduces the chances of errors further in the system.

Disadvantages: One of the major disadvantages of this approach is that it may cause very lengthy delays. This approach takes very long to implement and execute a process under it (Martinez & Pulier, 2015). This approach does not provide the freedom to the user to hide the identity of the references. This approach does not allow the user to generate new ideas.

The organization should choose the structured approach because it makes the processes under it implement sequentially (Pulier, Martinez & Hill, 2015). This approach divides the entire process into sub processes and the sub processes are executed according to their priority in the system.

• User using the IaaS model does not need to install or update any software that would be helpful for successfully running the system (Manvi & Shyam, 2014). The software are installed as well as updated by the service provider. The user can also access his data from anywhere and anytime.
• PaaS provides the services that are much cheaper compared to the services provided by (IaaS Erl, Cope & Naserpour, 2017). It provides tools for designing as well as testing.

• PaaS provides a platform where software can be created as well as launched. It provides tools for creating apps. Unlike other models, it has various characteristics such as scalability, multi-tenancy and availability (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). This model helps in reducing the cost incurred in creating as well as launching apps.
• IaaS allows the automatic deployment of storage, compute, networking services and networks. Using this model, the users can create their own data center (Kavis, 2014). This data center includes the capabilities and characteristics of the traditional ones. The users do not need to access to their servers from their system only, they can do it using others system as well (Kavis, 2014). Some providers that offers IaaS are Softlayer, Google Cloud, Navisite and many more.

Some factors that are to be considered before migrating to cloud and implementing any model are as follows:

• Data security
• Data location
• Data breaches
• Phishing
• Reliability
• Scalability

• IaaS is the simplest model among all the models. The services provided by this model are almost the same irrespective of the vendor from where the service has been taken (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). In this model, the third party allows a scalable and automated infrastructure of IT such as hosting, storage, networking, compute and many more.
• PaaS is the hardest model among all. PaaS model actually provides the basic services provided by IaaS. Along with that, it provides capabilities and tools in order to deploy as well as develop applications in a secured manner (Kavis, 2014). The tools provided might be database management, middleware, operating system or analytics. The vendors providing the services of PaaS are the biggest technology companies. They can allow capabilities of broad range to their consumers. The examples are Oracle Cloud Platform, Sales force-owned Heroku and many more.

SaaS model is the most appropriate model for SharePoint service. This is because in this model, the hypervisor and Virtual Machine are obtained.

Some challenges faced by the models are as follows

• SaaS is also refereed as software that is provided on-demand. Here the model is licensed according to the subscription basis; it is critically hosted as well (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). The chances of hackers stealing the information are high in this case.
• Service providers should be well researched before hiring services from them (Kavis, 2014). Most of the service providers would claim that they provide the safest services, which are free from data breaches and activities similar to that which is carried out by the hackers.
• Data location is one of the biggest issues faced by organization. The service providers so not inform organizations about where their data is saved (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). This is very important for the organization to know; especially weather the data is stored within the country.

Few recommendations that can be implemented in order to solve the problems in various models are as follows.

• Encryption: Encrypting the data before saving it to cloud is a good idea to save them from hackers (Kavis, 2014). The encryption includes hiding of the data with some encrypted key and the data can be accessed by decrypting it using its individual key.
• Research: A proper research should be carried out before hiring services from any service provider (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). Their service background should be checked very well so that they do not have the history of providing bad services or defective services to the organizations.

References

Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.

Erl, T., Cope, R., & Naserpour, A. (2017). Cloud Computing Design Patterns (paperback).

Hussein, N. H., & Khalid, A. (2016). A survey of Cloud Computing Security challenges and solutions. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, 14(1), 52.

Kavis, M. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). Hoboken: Wiley.

Manvi, S. S., & Shyam, G. K. (2014). Resource management for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in cloud computing: A survey. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 41, 424-440.

Martinez, F. R., & Pulier, E. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,069,599. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Pulier, E., Martinez, F., & Hill, D. C. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 8,931,038. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.