Remote Administration, Resource Management And SLA In Cloud Computing

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. 

Requirements of Remote Administration

Remote administration is a technique through which one can accomplish a secured view of a remote computer. Due to the advancement in the technology, the technology can be benefited to anyone who composes some basic requirements. There are some specific system requirements for the remote connection to be established and they are as follows:-

Any system which has an internet connection or LAN (local area network) connection can be administered remotely.

Server software has to be installed by the user on his system for secure remote administration. Thus, the user can enjoy the services remotely through any device or system. The internet connection of the user should be proper and not dial up in nature, as it constantly gets disconnected. After the establishment of the connection, the desktop screen of the host is visible to the client. Other than these, certain hardware requirements such as an adequate Ram, hard disk, and operating system to support the software are mandatory as well.

Resource management is essential in a system created or developed by human beings. It directly affects the three fundamental properties of a system which are cost, functionality and performance. The scarcity of resources has an adverse effect on the performance and cost of a service. It can also have an indirect impact on the functionality of the service and inefficiency may make the functions of the system more expensive or ineffective.

In the context of cloud computing, the resources are shared and moreover, the cloud being a complex system, it is very much necessary to optimize the use of resources in the cloud environment (Manageengine.com, 2016). The nature of cloud results into the unexpected call for resources and the requests can be beyond controls depending on the factors. So, it is considered that the cloud resource management needs complex policies for maximum optimization of resources. The main components for the resource management are cloud providers and clients. VMM (virtual machine monitor) and VIM (Virtualization Improved) are the core components of resource management (Cloudpatterns.org, 2016).

A contract between the two entities: service providers and clients which describe the terms and conditions of the services provided by the provider are called service level agreement. The service provider mentions the list of services to be provided by him and the penalties provider would pay if he is not able to meet the commitments. The SLA acts as a metrics for the service provider to judge its capabilities to deliver the performance. There are some specifications in SLA which are called as service level specifications. There are generally some parameters which are directly related to service such as throughput, latency, availability of network and so on. They describe the quality of service. Real-time reporting on the factors such as QoS (quality of service), administration, agreement violations, and usage is very much essential in SLA(Cloudpatterns.org, 2016). 

Requirements of Resource Management

Every application in cloud services should have high availability or resilience features and the requirements. The chosen service provider in this context is Amazon web services. Amazon web services (AWS) provides support to the clients to meet the needs of application resilience in a cost effective manner. An impactful high resilience strategy includes the use of multiple zones for availability, auto scaling, recovery up to certain extent, and continuous monitoring. The applications should ensure that the point of failures should be notified and assess the failures based on the needs of software and risk profile. In AWS, the resilience feature will not only include the recovery of a component but also the nature of resilience test which is to be performed while recovering the component. Some of the features of AWS are such as auto scaling, elastic IP address for the remapping of static IP addresses, load balancing across different availability zones and so on(Amazon, 2016).

There are specific requirements for backup and disaster recovery for applications and they are specifically bound to a recovery time and a recovery point (Whatiscloud.com, 2016). It also has particular geographic requirements which can be helpful at the time of recovery as the proximity between the actual site and the recovery site can be calculated.(Tech Target, 2016) An effective strategy for disaster recovery will include more than how a component can be recovered. For an example, it can be said that a component failed in a region can be re-launched at a different region automatically using warm, hot or cold stand bys. There are tests which are needed to be performed for the disaster recovery as the recovery of an application should be confirmed.(Soeldner, 2016)

At a certain level, an impactful disaster recovery and backup strategy needs to enrol and it would include global management of traffic (balancing of load), monitoring, recovery from region to region, and redundancy(Tech Target, 2016). There are certain techniques which are followed by the chosen provider AWS and they are as follows: –

It can store machine images, data, or can initiate additional instances in a different AWS location. Amazon Route 53 is used when DNS of a particular region has failed. Archive data is stored in Amazon glacier. (Onlinetech.com, 2016) (Sheilapantry.com, 2016) It also provides leverages to database log shipping which is a kind of data replication technique and it is asynchronous in nature. It also keeps reserves of disaster recovery in different region with the help of reserved instance feature of Amazon EC2. Amazon machine images or EBS snapshot copy can be used. Amazon S3 can be used for more security and protection of data. EBS snapshot copy can be used for quick disaster recovery(Sherwood, 2015).

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

SLA is originated by the network service provider, but it is now used by the cloud computing service providers and telecommunication service providers. SLA measures the quality of the service provider’s performance using number of ways. Some of the specific metrics used in the SLA are:

• Service provided to the number of concurrent users.
• Application Response Time.
• Response time of Help Desk for different classes of problems.
• Availability of the service at the percentages of time.
• Availability of the Usage Statics.
• Comparison of periodic performances with the benchmarks of specific performances.

To understand the various differences in the SLA and service and deployment model, the following guidelines models, such as laas, Saas or Pass. Apart from it, the models whose performances are also similar with the laas, saas or pass are Hybrid, Private (on-site) or Public models. Further, the crucial performance objectives are identified as:

• To get an insight into the business level performances objectives for the cloud opportunities such as reduction of cost, market the software functionality on per unit basis.
• Identification of the set of metrics, critical for the achievement of the business level performances objectives.
• It must be ensured that the continuous monitoring of the metrics of right level of granularity should be monitored in a cost-effective manner.
• To provide the consistency for the cloud metrics, majorly in the areas such as methods of collection, metrics definition, it is necessary to identify the standards properly.
• To influence the decisions of the business, metrics should be analysed and leveraged on the ongoing basis as a tool(Rouse, 2016).

To evaluate the privacy requirements and security deeply, it must be ensured that the following questions should be answered:

1. If the asset will be availed or distributed publically, how would the business will get harmed?
2. If the assessment of the assets is made by one of our cloud providers than how would the business get harmed?
3. If the functions or processes were manipulated by an outsider, then how the business will get harmed?
4. If the processes will fail to recover the expected results, then how the business will get harmed?
5. If there is an unexpected change in the information/data, then how would the business get harmed?
6. If the availability of the assets will get missed for a period of time, then how the business will be harmed? 

While making selection of the SLA, the following guidelines must be followed by the users:

• Make a choice for the measurement which will motivate the right behaviour: The first goal of the service provider is to choose the metrics which will serve with the appropriate behaviour on behalf of the service providers and client. Each side of the business must attempt to provide satisfactory results in order to meet the objectives of the performances(Rouse, 2016).
• Be assuring about the metrics that it should reflect the factors within the control of service provider: SLA metrics should reflect the factors within the control of the outsourcer for motivating the right behaviour. A typical mistake which is commonly committed is to penalize the service provider for the delay’s created due to lack of performances of the client’s (Paul, 2008).
• Choose measurements that are easily collected and balance the power of desired metrics: Ideally, the SLA metrics can be easily collected but in a ground of minimal overhead, it may not be possible for all desired metrics.
• Less is more: The choice of an excessive number of metrics or metrics that produces voluminous data must be avoided.
• Setting of proper baseline: Defining the right metrics is just like winning half of the battle. In order to make it useful, the setting of metrics should be made according to the reasonable and attainable performances. 

The assessment discusses the aspects of cloud services such as remote administration, its role and importance, management of resources and service level agreements. It also discusses the management of service level agreement and its importance in the service contract with the client. The assessment at the beginning starts with the discussion of remote administration and the requirements needed in a system for a successful remote administration. It also discusses the advantages of remote connection and administration in cloud service(Ikediashi, 2004). Further, in the assessment, the idea of resource management is discussed in wide scale. As resource management is very critical in cloud computing (because of shared resources and uncertain demand of resources from the user), it is very much important to monitor the availability of the resources and have an optimized solution for the resource management and provide resources to the users as per their needs. Further, the areas of impact of resource management are focused and it again certifies the importance of resources in cloud management and how it affects the performance, functioning and quality of clouds. Moreover, it also discusses the role of virtualization in resource management(Gsoedl, 2016). The assessment also provides an insight to the definition and importance of service level agreements and its management in the cloud computing industry. Service level agreements are very much essential and an important part of the client-server contract. The quality of service depends on service level agreements as it works as a metrics for the cloud consumers to judge the services of cloud providers. It also carries the agreement to penalize the providers, if the services according to the contract are not met (Golden, 2013; Onlinetech.com, 2016).

The assessment also describes about the nature of application in cloud service. It gives a broad idea about the management of application which is provided through cloud services (deployment models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). Amazon web services are chosen as the service provider. The technology provided through cloud is prone to disaster due to an internet connection. Therefore, in such cases application are made disaster proof by providing them resilience to such disaster. It increases the availability of applications (Zerto.com, 2016). Moreover, features like backup and recovery of the applications are entertained so that the applications can be recovered quickly and the consumers can experience an uninterrupted service. Various techniques of the chosen service provider in the assessment are compared and discussed. The different techniques, which are advanced in the current scenario, help in the quick recovery of applications. There are opportunities in the cloud management where different technologies can be used for better disaster recovery of the applications. Areas like resource management and application recovery need more methods for better management of services. More techniques have to be introduced for better services in cloud computing because still there are opportunities in cloud models which can enhance the quality of service for the consumers (Sherwood, 2015). 

References

Amazon. (2016, May 19). Disaster Recovery.

Cloudpatterns.org. (2016, May 20). Remote Administration System. 

Golden, B. (2013, february 19). Ensure Cloud Application Resilience the Netflix Way. 

Gsoedl, J. (2016). Disaster recovery in the cloud explained. 

Ikediashi, D. I. (2004). A Framework for outsourcing Facilities Management Services. School of the Built Environment Heriot-Watt University.

Manageengine.com. (2016, May 20). System Requirements.

Paul, L. G. (2008, November 20). Service-Level Agreements 101: An Executive Guide to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). 

Rouse, M. (2016). service-level agreement (SLA).

Sherwood, R. (2015, february 23). Cloud disaster recovery in a nutshell: How does it work? Retrieved May 19, 2016, from cloudcomputing: