A) Discuss the major issues facing that organizations and government agencies that are moving their IT functions to the Cloud? Does it depend upon what aspect of their IT operation they decide to move to the Cloud?
B) What concerns do individuals have now that their personal data is being moved to the cloud through services provided by Amazon, Google and Apple?
Reply:
This is the first student’s discussion you have to reply in 100 words:
Introduction
In data storage and computing, there are several challenges faced. Cloud being a software divided in both front end and capable of storing data in remote services, has been of greater use in computing services. Cloud services include internal software such as google drive, Microsoft drive, and yahoo email. Cases of hacking, loss, and exposure of classified information belonging to organizations and government agencies by hackers. As a result, most organizations and government agencies have decided to move their IT functions to the cloud.
What are the issues facing organizations and government agencies moving their IT functions to the cloud?
Lack of flexibility of information experienced by other computing techniques is one of the significant challenges making organizations move their IT functions to the cloud. Using traditional data computing techniques, employees cannot do and complete their tasks without access to the workstations. Furthermore, reducing the number of employees in workstations is hectic using other services. Organizations have therefore decided to adopt cloud computing for flexibility purposes. Also, other traditional computing systems experience data loss incidences, and therefore data backup plans are needed. To avoid such inconveniences and the cost of purchasing a data backup plan, cloud computing is adopted. Cloud computing is a backup plan on its own. Sharing valuable data among staff members and employees is hectic using traditional means (Faizi & Rahman, 2019). Therefore, the cloud computing technique is recommendable in such situations.
Does it depend on their operation?
The movement of IT operations to the cloud depends entirely on the type of IT function. Some IT operations can only be operated at the workstation and not at employees’ respective homes (Grupta, et al., 2018). Cloud computing has security risks, and some data can be breached conceptually. Therefore, utmost care is needed during such operations.
What is the individual concern when personal data is moved to the cloud?
Moving personal classified data to the cloud is associated with risks of malware injection. Hackers are capable of creating malware that interferes with personal data during their hacking process. Individuals are therefore concerned about their privacy protection.
As much as cloud computing is essential, it is associated with other risks interfering with personal security. Therefore, care should be taken when moving IT operations to the cloud.
References
Faizi, S. M., & Rahman, S. S. (2019). Securing cloud computing through IT governance. Available at SSRN 3360869.
Gupta, S., Misra, S. C., Kock, N., & Roubaud, D. (2018). Organizational, technological, and extrinsic factors in the implementation of cloud ERP in SMEs. Journal of Organizational Change Management.
This is the second student’s discussion you have to reply in 100 words:
Cloud computing has benefited many enterprises by reducing costs and enabling a focus on one’s core business competence, rather than IT and infrastructure issues. Despite the general hype on the subject across the IT world, there are also some major issues facing organizations and government agencies that are moving their IT functions to the Cloud. Since cloud computing systems are internet-based, service outages are always an unfortunate possibility and can occur for any reason. Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Any discussion involving data must address security and privacy, especially when it comes to managing sensitive data. In cloud computing, every component is online, which exposes potential vulnerabilities. Even the best teams suffer severe attacks and security breaches from time to time. Since cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed, and monitored by the service provider, it transfers minimal control over it to the customer. Pay-as-you-go cloud services can provide more flexibility and lower hardware costs, but the overall price tag could end up being higher than you expected.
Many organizations benefit from the agility, scale, and pay-per-use billing that cloud services offer. However, as with any infrastructure service, the suitability of cloud computing for the specific use case should be assessed in a risk-based evaluation. Build in time for research and planning to understand how the cloud will affect the business.
Moving data to the cloud involves a lot of security risks: compliance violations, contractual breaches, insecure API’s, issues on the provider’s side, misconfigured servers, malware, external attacks, accidental errors, insider threats, etc.
One of the main concerns that people have about cloud computing is security and privacy. They’re insecure about the fact that the data is being handled by some other company and it worries people sometimes. Due to the nature of cloud computing services and how they involve storing data without knowing its precise physical location, data security remains a concern for both prospective adopters of the technology and existing users.
Work Cited:
Gavrylov, Anton. “7 risks in cloud migration and how to avoid them.” N-iX, 2020, com/risks-cloud-migration-how-avo…”>https://www.n-ix.com/risks-cloud-migration-how-avo…
Larkin, Andrew. “Disadvantages of Cloud Computing.” Cloud Academy, 2019, https://cloudacademy.com/blog/disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/
Ma, Joy. “ Top 10 Security Concerns for Cloud-Based Services.” Imperva, 2015, https://www.imperva.com/blog/top-10-cloud-security…
The 3rd student discussion post you have to reply on:
Cloud computing break the boundaries of computing, it could integrate all the computing power and redistribute them by the demand. In our current world, most of the computing power is sitting idle, user build their computing elements to satisfy the maximum requirement, directly causing the waste of the computing resources. In theory, if all the users share the computing power, like they did to share the internet, the waste will be reduced greatly, so that the efficiency of our world would increase. To implement cloud computing, we don’t even need to redistribute the computing devices, instead, the restructure of the network and software system would do the job perfectly. In theory, not only the companies which own the large scale computers could provide the computing service, individuals could also ‘contribute’ to the cloud, and share the cloud computing as well.
We now have the theorem to build such systems which could benefits our society, however, there are still major concerns on cloud computing. In the previous and traditional ways the computation works, it works totally within the organization. Whatever they are computing with or storing won’t leak out to the outside. But with the cloud computing technique, everything is different. They need to rely on the outside computing and storing resources, and they might even not know the exact location of the computing device which is dealing with their business. In large business scale, the data might involve vital personal data, crucial trade secret and so forth, they can’t risk on the leakage of such data. By implementing cloud computing, the data transactions will surely increase, and it could be dangerous. And as a data service sharer, they also hold responsibility to keep others’ data safe, that could be another major problem for a company to accept could computing. In a word, Data Security is the major issue.
For personal aspect, cloud computing could also change our lives in many ways. For example, the cloud could store and analysis our physical conditions in a systematic way, to enhance a better health care. But that is also making people concerned about how the institution or government would use their data. Peosonal health data could be used to monitor desease, like warn the potential heart attack risk, but it could also be sold to the highest bidder, which would be selling some unnecessary medicines and stuff to the users. People themselves would never know what their data has been used to do, and they don’t got actual power to supervise the cloud. So for personal points of view, Privacy Issues are the major concern on the Cloud Computing.
So above is the brief analysis on the concerns on cloud computing. But I think cloud computing is relative a nice concept, just as the Internet to our society. We just need to enhance the security, and thrive with the cloud computing in the near future.
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