IT Governance and Strategy – Cloud Computing | Assignment Help
Introduction
The initiation of cloud computing in recent years has incited attention of different stakeholders of Information Technology and Computer science, for instance business corporations, and associations. This new-fangled computing pattern, cloud computing, has also produced confronts to the business who are seeking to implement it. Cloud computing methodology is the latest technological boom that has dramatically changed the landscape of many companies, especially for small, medium and micro sized enterprises (Hinde & Van Belle, 2012). While traditional systems were more vendor-specific and user-license restricted, cloud computing has changed the way of interaction between businesses and IT services.
The trend of cloud computing is placing pressure on conventional IT governance procedures to acclimatize. For corporations to make far-sighted and discreet verdicts concerning the implementation of cloud services, both IT governance and risk controllers have to work intimately with corporate decision-makers to encourage the comprehension of major cloud computing principles and to facilitate in creating effectual governance procedures. This paper elucidates the cloud computing governance, cloud computing strategy and corporate agility, performance measurement and also the financial impact of cloud computing.
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Overview of Governance and Cloud Computing Governance
According to (de Leusse, Dimitrakos, & Brossard, 2009), corporate governance can be explained as an array of procedures, ethnicity, strategies, principles and institutions influencing the manner in which a corporation is managed, organized and controlled. It focuses on the requirement for a mechanism to make certain that there is conformity with the regulations, strategies, principles and processes under which a corporation functions. IT governance framework involves the decision privileges, liability structures and procedures to support enviable behavior in the utilization of IT. The IT governance classifies the following four specific domains; the initial two are linked to business use, on the other hand, the last two are linked to compliance:
- Performance appraisal
- IT value deliverance
- IT strategic arrangement
- Management of risk
As stated by Keen et al (2007), service oriented architecture (SOA) governance is an expansion of IT governance, which sequentially is the broadening of corporate governance. According to different research studies (de Leusse et al., 2009; Linthicum, 2009; O’Neill, 2009), SOA governance tools and techniques can be influenced for cloud setting. In the literature, different researchers (Linthicum, 2009; Menken & Blokdijki, 2009; Dinoor, 2010; Microsoft, 2010; Cheliah, 2011) have discussed recurring issues which are related to:
- Compliance to principles and values
- Outcomes of altering services
- Making certain services’ quality
- Make organizations parallel with the cloud
- Collaborate and assess suppliers and their services
Via vigilantly scrutinizing/carrying out risk evaluation prior to starting the project, compliance to rules and principles can be elucidated. A number of compliance concerns, effects of altering services and ensuring services’ quality are linked to service actions (en bloc). The service performance can be certain via classifying strategies, observing the implementation of the services, and developing measure to build services. Making organizations parallel with the cloud can depend on designing novel implementation tactics for cloud, creating novel funding models to charge the services, and initiating novel units as well as responsibilities to keep control of cloud services. By concurring upon the communication plans and service level agreement (SLA), collaboration with suppliers can be guaranteed. As a final point, assessing suppliers can depend on the observation reports as well as business objectives attained via the services from suppliers.
For cloud governance, a further precise association is its linkage to SOA governance. Both intersect and likeness flanked by cloud computing and SOA give us a sign to draft a cloud governance model because of the egress SOA governance models and cloud governance literatures.
Cloud Computing Strategy and Corporate Agility
Cloud computing strategy is regarding facilitating corporate agility. When both information governance and security are fundamental requirements then the following six main components will be involved in order to structure a cloud strategy;
- Due Assiduousness – Identify the manner in which the information is protected.
- Vendor Management – Comprehend how the association is governed.
- Auditability – Identify how the internal controls of the provider protect the data.
- Information Security – Protect, scrutinize and implement the course of actions.
- Compliance Considerations – Be familiar with the regulatory surroundings.
- Business Stability – Reduce downtime and save the mission- crucial information from harm.
Marks & Lozano (2010) claimed that cloud computing suggests business agility in a crystal clear, simple to understand model. For the business beginners or for developing business requirements of established enterprises, cloud computing allows a company to carry out a rapid time to market model by providing a secure access to a ready to use IT infrastructure environment, hosted and managed by a trusted third party, with right-sized, scalable computing, network and storage capability, that one pays for only as they use it and based on how much of it they would use. Besides this, Marks and Lozano also have explained how cloud computing can transform fixed costs of a certain business to its variable costs. According to them, cloud computing offers a business executive the opportunity to transform what have conventionally been significant fixed costs of owning and operating a data center into variable cost, paid only by the volume of IT resources that are actually used, data center costs are paid up front, but are capital from a business perspective, while the physical assets are depreciated over their useful lives. Therefore, data centers are fixed costs in that expenses paid on monthly basis will be relatively fixed as contrary to business volume.
Buyya, Broberg, & Goscinski (2011) suggested that businesses should insist on comprehensive and impermeable contracts that involve requirements for the recovery and return of their data, even in the event of provider bankruptcy. Besides this, they should establish the country where servers and storage systems are located. Despite the cloud principles, services still have to be executed and data stored at specific physical locations. The physical locations of data determine the origin of the law and also determine which government agencies can access it. Besides these hard factors, enterprises have to consider that data-privacy cultures vary from place to place.
According to the authors, having the legal basis for the purpose of liability is a different factor rather than successfully executing them. Therefore, it is important to know the contractually agreed legal venue. In addition, it is meaningful to have a single end to end service level agreement (SLA) defining availability throughout the services. Even stricter legislative requirements apply where data are of a personal nature for e.g. employee details required in a Human Resource Management System. Financial data are also subjected to severe limitations. In many parts of Europe, personal data enjoys special protection. Even encryption cannot assure total security. As stated by the authors, the solutions that process and store data in encrypted form go a long way so as to meet legislative data protection requirements. Nevertheless, they are prohibited in some countries. As a consequence, there are limits to secure data encryption in the cloud.
Maintaining Feasibility in Business
By and large, cloud computing is elucidated as a system based on cost minimization. Rather than being capital expenditure oriented, the system is operational expenditure oriented (Chee and Franklin, 2009). Nevertheless, it is not providential that cost of maintaining feasibility in business is augmented via hiring experts to manage cyber terrorism in order to protect data. This is accomplished by means of purchasing electronic tools that hold off any imminent intimidation. Highly experienced personnel are required for the management of such systems who have to be remunerated generously to deliver the service. Grossman (2009) defined security as an area of cloud computing that presents some special challenges. The first challenge for the hosted clouds is that a third party is responsible for storing data and at the same time securing it properly. Third parties can take advantage of economies of scale to provide a level of security that might not be feasible in terms of cost for smaller scaled firms but a negative aspect is that two or more organizations might share the same physical resource and not be aware of it.
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