The Strategic Advantage of Cloud Computing

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary
Summary of the Assignment
Organization’s Expectations
SWOT Analysis
Three Key Recommendations and Justifications
Conclusions
Reference List

Executive Summary

The purpose of this paper is to create a business case on Oxfam Australia to suggest the CEO change cloud-computing services as an advantageous step for this social welfare organization. At the initial stage, this report will concentrate on the organizational background with the knowledge management system, a basic overview of the current cloud computing initiative, benefits, the risks associated with this initiative, and the goal of the projects. However, this report will focus on Oxfam’s current data storage status with previous dilemmas related to the data storage system, cost, and knowledge management. At the same time, this paper will include the expectation of Oxfam to achieve through cloud computing including objectives and probable advantages to assist the CEO to take effective measures in this regard.

To explain the position of the present system, this report will perform a SWOT analysis, which discusses the difference between the current and desired data storage status of the selected organization and it will suggest some solution to remove the identified problems in the cloud computing system and then categorize three most effective recommendations. On the other hand, this paper will suggest the IT management team incorporate several applications to remove challenges in cloud technology and to increase scalability, flexibility, and decrease operating costs. However, this paper will recommend the CEO to find out new cloud computing service provider for Oxfam Australia, which offers database storage at a competitive price and gives a quality security system to protect loss of information from a database or backup data storage. In addition, this report will identify possible challenges of the systems, for instance, collaborating actions, internal conflicts, distributed denial of services (DDoS), Economic denial of services (DDoS), isolation breakdown, legal barrier, problems in backup data storage.

Summary of the Assignment

Description of Oxfam Australia

According to Oxfam Australia (2010), it is a self-governing NFP development organization, which assists to defeat paucity and inequality internationally; it affords individuals with expertise, awareness, and assets to come out of poverty and apply the fundamental societal, economic, and civil rights; moreover, it equips neighborhoods, associates, and personnel with tools to attain basic-rights to education, food, clean water, healthcare, and fairness. It is an affiliate of Oxfam International, an intercontinental association with fourteen sovereign Oxfam groups, which jointly operate at ninety-nine nations.

One Cloud Computing Initiative of Oxfam Australia

Oxfam Australia has initiated public cloud for its data storage to achieve the aims of backing up and restoring an overgrowing-database whilst ascertaining high-level accessibility to global users, to enhance Oxfam’s receptiveness through trouble-free access towards a cost-effective, bendy technology stand for running resourcefully, and to get programmed disaster recovery/back-up sites as well as the location emancipation cloud.

Benefits and Risks Associated

For many large organizations, the start-up cost of projects remains one key factor upon which they take decisions; cloud computing is a relatively cheap, elastic, and ecologically sustainable solution that helps businesses to become agile and much more flexible to external influences. However, several risks are present as well, which, for example, include apprehension of poor security, data-location or confidentiality, and excessive reliance on accessibility, superiority, and performance of the internet connection.

Organization’s Expectations

Through this, Oxfam Australia expects better technological flexibility, more transferability, better prospects for interrelation and association, higher utilization of the assets, better management of capacity, and most importantly, making lesser contribution over carbon footprint.

Oxfam Australia’s Current Data Storage Status

Currently, Oxfam Australia is maintaining its data storage through the public cloud, that is, it is accessible to people from a third-party service provider through the internet. Although now the organization is maintaining its data in a much better way than the previous methods (Onwindows, 2007), because of adopting public cloud, it is now disadvantaged to get benefits of private computing, which is extremely important for managing data within the organization without the restrictions of network bandwidth, security exposures and lawful requirements that public cloud services contain.

Oxfam Australia initially used PeopleSoft to afford applications for logistics, finance, and project management; because of a great global presence, one of the organization’s objectives is the deliverance of these applications to inaccessible places and in distressed regions, usually with incredibly inadequate bandwidth; for achieving aims of backing-up and restoring an overgrowing-database, whilst ascertaining high-level accessibility to worldwide-users, Oxfam switched to Quest Software. According to Mohamed (2006), data for PeopleSoft application was stored in a series of SQL Server databases; though production-database holds live data, numerous additional copies of the database were characteristically required and used for development, quality assurance, and training-purposes; as the volume of live data raises with time, the size of additional copies expanded at the same rate, as they were refreshed.

This not only increased amount of storage required, but also raised the length of backup and restores-times throughout nightly housekeeping-activity; Oxfam originally used native-Windows file compression and PKZIP to diminish the size of daily backups to disk, which was then copied to LTO-tapes – it wanted to lower operational-costs, but as data expanded, it spent increasing amounts of time finding space on the network for backups. Oxfam assessed the market to look for an appropriate solution and made a resolution to appraise LiteSpeed from Quest-Software; meanwhile, one of Oxfam’s DBAs had presented an article to a SQL Server Internet technological discussion that won Article of the Month; inadvertently, the prize was a copy of LiteSpeed; Oxfam got 10:1 compression, and the process has not required any additional space. LiteSpeed abridged its daily housekeeping by 50%, from 6 to 3 hrs, escalating global accessibility and staying on track with demand; the production database takes only twenty minutes to back up and ninety minutes to restore that is twice as quick as when the database was half its present size – these will make a certain minimum disturbance to decisive PeopleSoft applications.

However, by adopting public cloud, it cannot get benefits of private computing, which is tremendously essential for overseeing data within the business without limitations of network-bandwidth, security-exposures and lawful requirements that public cloud contain; additionally, private cloud offer provider and user greater control of cloud-infrastructure, improving security and resiliency because of user access and networks used are restricted and designated. Private-cloud is exceptionally helpful for big organizations; for instance, if the payroll department confronts a rush in workload in 15th and 30th every month, they require sufficient computing power to deal with maximum-workload; moreover, with a private cloud, computing power is spread across the organization, so both the payroll-department and other departments get extra-cycles when they need, saving considerably throughout the organization (CCUCDG, 2009). The current data storage system, therefore, does not allow Oxfam Australia to get these advantages of managing data efficiently within different departments and saving costs that arise from past methods of internal data storage (Stephen, 2001).

Oxfam Australia’s Anticipated Benefits & Objectives from Hybrid Cloud Computing

To achieve its objectives to better serve the community by ensuring their free and easy access to all the necessary data as well as managing them effectively within the organization, it would be highly beneficial for Oxfam Australia to come up with hybrid cloud computing, which is a combination of both public and private cloud. Because this will give Oxfam a chance to enjoy both public and private cloud simultaneously, the anticipated benefits and objectives in adopting this include the following outlined in the table:

Anticipated Benefits	Explanation Behind the Objective
Scalability	Cloud computing is elastic; it can enlarge and abridge mechanically and offer resources on-demand for numerous archetypal magnitudes as well as servers, storage and networking, which Oxfam Australia requires; on-demand feature of cloud computing means that as demand increases/decreases, the capability could much effortlessly correspond the demand; in addition, there is no need to over provision for the peaks. At the software level, it would endorse Oxfam’s developers and IT-operations to expand, organize, and function rapidly without collapsing, devoid of thinking about the position or infrastructure; moreover it can also provide minor agencies or working partners of Oxfam with trouble-free access to a cost effective, flexible technology podium for functioning efficiently in terms of applications capacity and scalability.
Cost effectiveness	Kynetix (2009) suggests that use of cloud computing correspond with cash-flow more properly than the conventional methods; previously, organizing all these required massive investments; additionally, other risk factors were present too, which comprised collapse of IT for lower user-acceptance – but now, cloud computing can shift organizations like Oxfam Australia from a capital investment to an operational expenditure.
Organisation’s responsiveness	Adoption of cloud computing has expected to enhance Oxfam’s responsiveness; the speed at which new computing capacity could requisition remains a key constituent of cloud computing; adding additional-storage, network bandwidth, memory, and computing power, everything gains a fast pace; majority of cloud providers utilize infrastructure-software which could effortlessly adjoin, shift, or modify an application with extremely small interference by cloud-provider-workers.
Automated failure revitalization and back-up sites	Through this, the burden of overseeing technology is placed on the technology provider; provider’s liability is to afford built-in data protection, error tolerance, self-healing, and failure revitalization, whilst in previous technologies, failure revitalization costs were double the cost of the infrastructure, in a cloud-based model, true failure revitalization is projected to cost slightly more than the first time’s costs.
Mechanism and location emancipation cloud	By applications and data positioned over the cloud, it would be quite trouble-free for Oxfam to facilitate end-users to access systems regardless of their location or the device they are using; any personnel could be promptly brought online, distant administrative-centres could be instantly communicated, temporary groups could be effortlessly set-up on site, and movable access could be immediately facilitated.
Ecologically-sustainable solution	Maximum internal data centres are outsized, which may never ever function at full capacity; the carbon footprint of these traditional data centres is therefore a considerable disquiet for numerous organisations; at a cloud computing environment resources have shared across applications (and even ordinary public) ensuing in better utilization of the resources for a similar energy cost (Intel Corporation, 2009).

Table 1: Anticipated benefits and objectives for Oxfam Australia. Source: Self-generated.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

This new cloud computing includes remote monitoring, security services along with anti-virus scanning and other back-end offerings, which would help the human management team or other administrators to control and monitor the overseas employees by using the technology, as this social welfare organization has more than 6000 employees all over the world. However, it would be cost-effective from the previous services for users as well as for the administrators due to having flexible provisions in the new ones, which would be specially designed by the Information Technology (IT) department. According to the knowledge management report of Stephen (2001, p. 3), Oxfam deals with different projects in different regions, which should require special management controlling systems with different technology; therefore, new cloud computing would have advanced technologies to serve the management and employees of different projects. Moreover, this system would facilitate both staff and general people in the period of disaster; however, a Web-based working tool would be accessible by the employees of Oxfam Australia, which includes daily-updated disaster information in a different format, such as mapping, current features, the performance of the employees, data on Australia, data exchange on disaster response operations, information about resources, and so on. In addition, it must provide sufficient actions and guiding principles for disaster response practitioners as well as disaster management to protect the people of the affected zone by coordinating their initiatives with the government and similar non-profit organizations to serve food, water, and other services.

At the same time, the management of Oxfam Australia is highly concerned with the effectiveness of security measures of cloud computing considering the previous worst experiences and recent crisis of social welfare organizations in this regard. As a result, the system will concentrate more on the security system of databases to follow the provisions related to Privacy Act 1988 and to protect the data of the organization from being stolen or lost. On the other hand, this report would recommend the Chief Executive Officer of this organization to introduce or purchase security measures, for example, hardware and software redundancy, powerful authentication, effective role-based access control, data storage system for multiple locations, processing along with delivery closer to the network edge and many others systems considering the requirement of the projects and location. However, this report would also suggest the organization take the technological support from the cloud service provider, which can ensure rapid data collection process from the database as it has to be one of the strongest points of this cloud computing system.

Weaknesses

Lose of data and cost of the applications can be the key weaknesses for the cloud computing system of Oxfam Australia, therefore, the management of this organization should have both short-term and long-term objectives to overcome such weakness. However, this report suggests the CEO develop SQL database, networking, and organization management system by integrating several applications, such as it should incorporate enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP application system, Software Asset Management (SAM), Computer Assistance Learning (CAL), and Software as a Service (SaaS) (Laudon & Traver, 2002). However, the IT management team of Oxfam should develop a long-term human resources management plan with training provisions for the enhancement of the cloud computing system; however, integration of software in the company is a costly project; thus, they need to raise funds each year and include in the budget of the separate projects.

Opportunity

Makani (2008) pointed out two dimensions of knowledge, such as tacit and explicit knowledge where the former one can achieve from experience while the last one presents knowledge, which has been codified and held in management books, manuals, and databases; however, this cloud computing system would allow gathering both forms of knowledge. However, Oxfam has designed many awareness programs as social welfare and non-profit organization; therefore, it should have a separate web-based portal for the different projects, which would allow meeting the organizational goals and to success the projects or any awareness campaigns. Oxfam has scope to utilize and interlink databases, for instance, www, wrapper, Open Database Connectivity, and SQL databases those integrate with the collective data and store while the database contains the relative information about the projects of the organization, customers, employees, and others; however, the Z39.50 wrapper can use to support the information about the www interfaces and ACL.

Threats

Serrat (2009) and Bechtel Corporation (2009) stated lack of security of the database is the main threat of cloud computing systems through service providers can restore data from the backup data storage while users want safe service from both ends as a security system can break down due to simple human errors; therefore, organizations should rotate data from one to another computer. At the same time, it has to concentrate on some organizational challenges to implement hybrid cloud computing, such as collaborating activities, mismanagement for the internal conflicts between executives, distributed denial of services (DDoS), Economic denial of services (DDoS), isolation failure, the risk from changes of jurisdiction, network breaks, backups lost and so on (Catteddu & Hogben, 2009).

Three Key Recommendations and Justifications

Assessment of the Recommendations
Key Recommendations	Justifications
1. Adopting Hybrid Cloud Computing For Data Storage	Enjoying both public and private cloud computing simultaneously	This will give Oxfam a chance to make use of both public and private cloud at the same time and obtain the benefits of both sharing data with the communities and stakeholders and managing them efficiently within Oxfam – this would lower the costs of sharing information externally and internally.
	Helps Oxfam to attain its mission	As a non-profit making organisation, it is very much important for Oxfam to make sure that its data storage costs remain much lower even after sharing them with all the communities of its operations where people would come to know more about Oxfam in order to participate in the organisation’s programmes. It would also assist Oxfam to achieve its aim of ensuring transparency between different departments.
	Smart capacity utilisation	Hybrid cloud can ensure higher capacity utilisation because of the elasticity/scalability that it offers (Scale, 2009).
2. Selecting the Hybrid Cloud Provider Carefully	Selecting provider with high degree of flexibility	It is necessary for the providers to be highly flexible in order to make sure that the system can be updated anytime at request (Cervone, 2010).
	Ensuring provider’s efficiency	The provider should be efficient enough to ensure cyber security.
	Back up sites	The provider should be capable to recover quickly from potential hacking.
3. Conducting Thorough Research For Assessing the Risks Involved	Assessing the risks of cyber security	Before uploading important data online, it would be feasible for Oxfam to evaluate that apart from financial risks, what other probable troubles may arise.

Table 2: Three Key Recommendations and Justifications. Source: Self-generated.

Conclusions

At present, Oxfam Australia is preserving its data through public cloud, which indicates that it is available to stakeholders from an intermediary service provider through the internet; for Oxfam, the intermediary service provider is Quest Software, which offers the organization to deliver all the required applications to remote places and in third world countries that usually have very inadequate bandwidth. Even though presently Oxfam is preserving its data in a rather enhanced approach than the preceding systems, for the reason of selecting public cloud, it cannot achieve the advancements in interdepartmental operations that flows from of private cloud, which manages data within the organization without the restrictions of network bandwidth, security-exposures, and lawful requirements that public cloud services enclose.

To come out of these problems, it is tempting for Oxfam Australia to adopt hybrid cloud computing, with which it would be able to run both public and private cloud concurrently and better perform in terms of organizational management. This will give Oxfam a chance to make use of both the clouds at the same time and obtain the benefits of both sharing data with the communities and stakeholders and managing them efficiently within Oxfam – this would lower the costs of sharing information externally and internally. A hybrid cloud can come from an amalgamated cloud-provider that merges its resources with those of other providers; this could be a broker as well that offers hybrid cloud; the dissimilarity will be that a broker does not have any hybrid resources of its own; moreover, the provider of hybrid cloud should cope cloud resources based on Oxfam’s terms. On the other hand, it is important to note that to adopt hybrid cloud computing, Oxfam Australia’s provider needs to have several requirements, including merged individuality, location knowledge, metering and supervising, management and corporate-governance, data protection, interoperability industry detailed standards, Cloud-Storage-API, Cloud Database API, Cloud Middleware-API, data and application federation SLAs, as well as lifecycle management.

Oxfam Australia is strongly recommended to adopt hybrid cloud computing for data storage which would help the organization to attain its mission together with excellent capacity utilization (hybrid cloud can ascertain better capacity utilization because of the elasticity and/or scalability that it offers). In addition, this global not for profit business should select the hybrid cloud provider vigilantly, and choose the ones with a high degree of flexibility (as it is necessary for the providers to be extremely flexible to make sure that the system can be altered anytime), and check the provider’s efficiency before making any important decisions. Moreover, Oxfam Australia should also check to see if the provider is proficient enough to ensure cyber security, come up with backup sites, and recover quickly from potential hacking. More importantly, the firm needs to carry out systematic research for assessing the risks involved (for example, the risks of cybercrimes), before uploading the data online; in this way, it would be viable for Oxfam to appraise all the risks including the financial ones as well as the other probable security or functioning problems.

Reference List

Bechtel Corporation (2009). Cloud Computing—Overview, Advantages, And Challenges For Enterprise Deployment. Web.

Catteddu, D. & Hogben, G. (2009). Benefits, risks and recommendations for information security. The European Network and Information Security Agency. Web.

CCUCDG (2009). Cloud Computing Use Cases. Web.

Cervone, H. F. (2010). An overview of virtual and cloud computing. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 26(3). Web.

Harris, J. G., Alter, A. E., & Harris, J (2011). Questions top executives should ask about cloud computing. Web.

Intel Corporation (2009). Taking Advantage of Cloud Computing. Web.

Kynetix (2009). Cloud Computing A Strategy Guide for Board Level Executives. Web.

Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2002). E- commerce- Business, Technology, Society. (4^th ed.). London: Pearson Education.

Makani, J. (2008). Knowledge Management and International Organizations: Perspectives on Information Professionals’ Role. Libri, 58(144-154). Web.

Mohamed, A. (2006). Oxfam solves thorny data storage problem. Web.

Onwindows (2007). Case Study: Oxfam. Web.

Oxfam Australia (2010). Annual Report 2010. Web.

Scale, M. E. (2009). Cloud computing and collaboration. Web.

Serrat, O. (2009). Enhancing Knowledge Management Strategies. Web.

Stephen, J. (2001). Knowledge Management in Oxfam. Web.

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