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Case Study Analysis

Changwei Xu

Ottawa University

CLOUD COMPUTING IT-8003

Dr. Patrick Mattson

December 12, 2020

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Summary:

Pennsylvania state university is trying to establish a resource sharing platform that can let

customers share, upload, researching the resources all over the word. We are going to use cloud

computing to establish platform. In this case analysis, I’ll discuss the steps that how to set up

the cloud computing system and how we can do to help with the organization to reach out the

final goal.

Team Assembled

To establish a team to help with the project, we are preparing the team will separate into

different department:

1. Senior management team: helping with establish principles and directions of the projects

2. IT team: establish cloud computing structures and motoring daily performance.

3. Sales team: helping with consulting and product planning.

4. Marketing team: analyze market environment and competitor analysis, as well as

customer feedback and improvement strategies.

5. Finance team: imputed cost, help with manage the cost of the project

6. Legal team: set up terms and conditions for the project. Set up contract with third party

cloud computing platform.

Could computing strategy and models

As we are establishing a platform for customer all over the world and provide them a

better and more efficiency research experience, we are going to use hybrid cloud as the

deployed cloud model. Also, the main cloud we choose for Penn State University is the IaaS

cloud service model. Which focus heavily on infrastructure. Another one is SaaS, because
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Penn State University will need many tooling as well.

1. Hybrid cloud model

Hybrid cloud has combined both public cloud and private cloud. It’s cheaper and safer for

only use public cloud or private cloud. The company that we are going to choose to use is

Amazon Web Services (AWS).

2. IaaS and SaaS

With IaaS, we can outsource referrals elsewhere. We are going to use AWS, IaaS service

as well. The companies will provide off-site servers, storage and networking hardware, as

well as an option to rent them.

With SaaS, the engineers can use website to development, track and monitor.

Policies and service agreements

As we are using Amazon AWS cloud computing service, we are mainly stay with using

the service agreement. The technician will contact the AWS team to identify how we can

control more when accident happened, like service out of service, service out of electricity,

how to keep the data safe and the privacy terms for using their services.

Also, the technician and legal team will define the service agreement with the customer.

The main thing will focus on the responsibilities, the privacy terms and how to keep the

customer’s data safe. The responsibility of our service includes how to manage the data and

what services we can provide.

Integrate with existing enterprise services

First, enterprise integration is a data challenge. Today in the organization there are vast

amounts of data, we often use the word "big data" to represent the size of the data source and
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variety. A great amount of data exist in all kinds of non-standard format will has important

commercial value, but first must be from multiple sources or application to integrate them.

Traditional integration methods (i.e., controlled by the centralized team to monomer

technology) will hinder the development of distributed applications and effective and

practical.

Develop a proof-of-concept (POC) before moving to production

POC is usually a kind of product or supplier capability verification work carried out by

enterprises during product selection or before carrying out external implementation projects.

Verify the content：

1. The function of the product. Product functions are provided by enterprises, which can

provide a list of functions according to their own requirements or list the functions they

need after communicating with several suppliers.

2. Product performance. Performance indicators are also provided by the enterprise, and it is

recommended to provide specific performance indicators for the application of the

environment and hardware equipment test environment requirements.

3. API applicability of the product.

4. Relevant technical documents, product standardization, integrity.

5. When it comes to the development of custom functions, the openness of API and

implementation ability of suppliers shall be verified

6. Enterprise qualification scale and enterprise implementation cases

The engineering team will start a document, when they start beginning the test, it needs to

include the purpose, the content, the standard and schedule of the test. After set up the
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schedule, the test need to start. The first step is test in general, after that we need to collect for

test feedbacks from the customers. The last step is to organize all the feedbacks and finish the

POC.

Manage the cloud environment

Hybrid clouds can be very complex. Our IT teams must consider how their platforms and

applications interact to ensure optimal performance. By comprehensively reviewing how data

is captured, analyzed, stored, and retrieved, IT teams can begin to build an infrastructure that

is consistent with these requirements. There are five components that we need to be more

attention:

1. Understand what are the contents that we are managing for

Engineering team needs to understand the applications in their environment and the

required access they have. They also need to know the capabilities of their applications,

including how they interact with end users, how they manage data, and how they handle

networking, security modes, and performance.

2. Understanding security and governance

Governance requires policies to be formulated and enforced, and the people who manage

the hybrid cloud must understand the enforcement to avoid conflicts or hinder operations.

3. Create a single management platform

The people who manage the hybrid cloud also need to manage its complexity. This is

because both private and public clouds come with their own local APIs and resources. In

fact, they all manage storage, networking, configuration, and security in different ways. If
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the engineer team integrate a single management interface to manage the cloud platform,

IT managers can save valuable resources and time.

4. Know your Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A service level agreement, or SLA, is defined in the contract between the end user and the

cloud computing provider to ensure that a minimum of services is provided. The engineer

team must be familiar with these terms to ensure that they are always getting the best

service for the business of the enterprise.

5. Understanding of the available tools

Hybrid clouds can be very complex. Engineer team must consider how their platforms and

applications interact to ensure optimal performance. By comprehensively examining how

data is captured, analyzed, stored, and retrieved, engineer team can begin to build an

infrastructure that is consistent with these requirements.

Conclusion:

Based on what Pennsylvania State University need, we have been working on and establish

all the contents we need. The cloud computing system will provide the customers a better user

performance, also it can make the research system more efficiency and reliable.