SoftArc Engineering Office Automation: Approaches And Recommendations

Two Different Approaches For Providing Office Automation

After the identification and analysis of business processes that is incorporated in the SoftArc Enginnering organization, it has been found that the organization needs a information system for collecting data and analysing it (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). One approach is implementing a system that will automatically track the work of the employee and generate report. This system will be deployed within cloud. Another approach is, implementing the database of the system in the premise of the organization.

Issues: The major issues in the cloud-based approach are as following.

1. Security Issue: The security is the biggest issues in terms of cloud-based approach (Seiki et al., 2015). As the information flows from devices to the cloud database through open internet, the possibility information theft becomes very high.
2. Service Unavailability: As the cloud vendors will provide the service, it is possible that the organization will experience lack of service.
3. Lack of Control: SoftArc will be holding less amount of control over the system as the cloud system will be under the supervision of cloud vendors (Bruneo, 2014). If the organization wants to have change in the system, the organization have to contact with the vendor and wait for their response.
4. Lack of Data Integrity: As the organization do not have direct access to the database, it is possible that could vendors may alter some of the data (Seiki et al., 2015). The vendors have the power to share the organizational data with the competitors.

Benefits: The benefits of the cloud-based approach are as following.

1. Remote Data Access: The users of the system can access the data from anywhere and anytime with a supported device and internet connection.
2. Less amount of costs: The capital requires for implementing the cloud system is significantly low as all the resources will be provided by the vendor. SoftArc has to provide only the charge as per resources usage or time period basis (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016).
3. Better concentration on business: SoftArc can concentrate on their business with the use of the cloud-based system as all the system related headaches are for the vendors.

Issues: There are several issues regarding the in-house system.

High Cost: In order to implement an in-house system, SoftArc has to pay for the resources including human resources (Choi & Chan, 2015).

Restriction on Data Access: The users can not access the data of the system without a authorized device. In order to access the system, they have to physically preset within the system service area.

Benefits: The benefits of the in-house system are as following.

Better Data Availability: The data availability is much more better in the in-house system as all the points in the network are closely connected (Yamada et al., 2015).

Security: In-house systems are most secured systems. In order to hack the system, the hacker have to be physically connected to the system.

As per the need of the SoftArc from the new system, it is better for the organization to implement a complete cloud based system. However, with the in-house database, SoftArc can provide a way better security to the organizational sensitive data. Currently, the organization is looking for increasing the responsiveness and flexibility not concentrating more on the security. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service will be using the replication environment as it handles the workload required for providing the better availability, flexibility and responsiveness. The lesser amount cost of the system is another requirement of SoftArc and this supports the decision of going for IaaS cloud system.

Factors	locally hosted infrastructures	IaaS
Security	The amount of security it provides to the client system is very high	As the data are shared among various clients, it is not secured enough
Cost	The cost of the infrastructure is costly as all the cost have to bared by the client	As the infrastructure is shared among various clients, the cost is low
Data accessibility	The data access is low	There is no limit in data access

Table 1: Difference Between Locally Hosted Architecture and IaaS

(Source: Sultan, 2014)

Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock in the system is considered as the dependency of the organization on the cloud vendor organization.

Security: Security is referred to as one of the major concerns for the cloud computing technology (Garg, Versteeg & Buyya, 2013).

Vulnerability: The occurrence of prominent risk will make the system vulnerable that causes from urgent modification in the system.

Major Issues and Benefits of Two Approaches

Factor	PaaS	SaaS	IaaS
Support to user	Provide a platform in which the user can deploy the software	It provides a point of access to the application running on a server	Provide computer and other hardware resources through dashboard
Method of obtain	The consumer deploys application on PaaS	The consumer buys the SaaS	The consumer builds the IaaS
Example	AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, Windows Azure,	Email, CRM, health associated application	Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Joyent, Cisco Metapod, Microsoft Azure,

Table 2: Difference between PaaS, SaaS and IaaS

(Source: Kachele et al., 2013)

The use of platform as a service is the best way of providing the share points service to the employees. The Platform as a Service is the best option as it can provide on-demand, self service regarding the users, the access of network is wide, the resource pool shared among the users is present, it is able to scale the resource of the system as per the need of the user (Wu, Garg & Buyya, 2015). The Service as a Platform can also be used for deploying the Share Point 2013 in the cloud but the biggest advantage is that the application will not be flexible. However, through the use of the SaaS for share point 2013 the opportunity of accessing the “off the shelf” share point applications can be achieved. Therefore, on the basis of the  requirements of SoftArc, it can be stated the use of the PaaS can be a better solution in this case. In addition to that, the deployment model is also a considerable factor (Sultan, 2013). The organizations only wants to access the software from a remote location and the data used in the SharePoint is highly valuable to the organization. Keeping that in consideration, it can be stated that the use of the private cloud is ideal for this situation.

The main issues that the organization will be facing after implementing the application on PaaS is that the off the shelf applications of SharePoint software cannot be accessed.

With the PaaS show, organizations get a center facilitating working framework and discretionary building piece benefits that enable organizations to run  organization’s ’s own particular applications or outsider applications. organization’s require not be worried about lower level components of Infrastructure, Network Topology, Security and Load Balancers – this is accomplished for organization’s by the Cloud Service Provider. The Provider gives organization’s a completely useful OS with significant stage programming.

Microsoft Windows Azure as PaaS can be utilized as an improvement, benefit facilitating and benefit administration condition. SQL Azure can give information administrations, including a social database, announcing and information synchronization. Both Windows Azure and SQL Azure are the key parts of the Azure Cloud Platform. With this stage, organization’s can concentrate on sending  organization’s ’s custom applications and can without much of a stretch design  organization’s ’s applications to scale up or down as requests change (Wu, Garg & Buyya, 2015). 

Reference List:

Bruneo, D. (2014). A stochastic model to investigate data center performance and qos in iaas cloud computing systems. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 25(3), 560-569.

Choi, Y., & Chan, A. P. (2015). PROVEAN web server: a tool to predict the functional effect of amino acid substitutions and indels. Bioinformatics, btv195.

Garg, S. K., Versteeg, S., & Buyya, R. (2013). A framework for ranking of cloud computing services. Future Generation Computer Systems, 29(4), 1012-1023.

Kachele, S., Spann, C., Hauck, F. J., & Domaschka, J. (2013). Beyond IaaS and PaaS: An extended cloud taxonomy for computation, storage and networking. In Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2013 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on (pp. 75-82). IEEE.

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

Seiki, T., Kodama, C., Noda, A. T., & Satoh, M. (2015). Improvement in global cloud-system-resolving simulations by using a double-moment bulk cloud microphysics scheme. Journal of Climate, 28(6), 2405-2419.

Sultan, N. (2013). Knowledge management in the age of cloud computing and Web 2.0: Experiencing the power of disruptive innovations. International journal of information management, 33(1), 160-165.

Sultan, N. (2014). Making use of cloud computing for healthcare provision: Opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Information Management, 34(2), 177-184.

Wu, L., Garg, S. K., & Buyya, R. (2015). Service Level Agreement (SLA) based SaaS Cloud Management System. In Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), 2015 IEEE 21st International Conference on (pp. 440-447). IEEE.

Yamada, Y., Kuzuyama, T., Komatsu, M., Shin-ya, K., Omura, S., Cane, D. E., & Ikeda, H. (2015). Terpene synthases are widely distributed in bacteria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(3), 857-862.