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Name: Instructor: Course: Date:

CIS360, Fall 2011, Homework Assignment #6: Cloud Computing & Alternative Sourcing Strategies Question 1: What are the key characteristics of cloud computing?

Cloud computing has the following key elements:

Cloud computing offers on-demand self-service interfaces that allow clients to easily set up themselves without assistance and get the resources they need at any time. They can dispose these resources when they no longer need them.

Resource pooling, location and device independence: resource storage, access and processing are deployed within a common infrastructure ensuring balanced demand. Users can access these resources regardless of where they are or the type of device they are using since infrastructure is provided by a different party and users can have access to them through the internet from anywhere.

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Cloud computing users are billed on per-use basis. They are only required to fees based on their use of bandwidth, storage and/or power. This is what is referred to as pay-peruse.

Cloud computing offers consumers swift elasticity enabling them to either decrease or increase their usage capacity at will.

It allows for universal access through internet-enabled devices. Cloud computing enables shared access to a single software resource hosted on a server by various organizations a concept referred to as multi-tenancy. This also enables cost sharing across a large pool of consumers.

Centrality of Cloud computing enables ease of maintenance.

Question 2: What is the difference between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS? Give an example of each. SaaS Software as a service refers to on-demand software where consumers are able to rent software and all its related data hosted by a third-party supplier. For example Fortiva's email archiving service, Salesforce, Google's Gmail, SPSCommerce.net and NetSuite. PaaS Platform as a Service refers vendors hosting programming tools, infrastructure and frameworks that are leased to consumers to help them develop their own applications. Examples of PaaS include the Google app-engine and Microsofts Azure. IaaS on the other hand is a services offered by a vendor that provides load balancing, computer networking, routing, content delivery networks, virtualized operating system hosting

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and commodity data storage for consumers to rent. For example: Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS), VMware. Question 3: How does SaaS differ from a packaged software solution? For SaaS, software applications are hosted and managed from a centralized location thus enabling clients to access the software resources remotely through the internet as opposed to packaged software solutions where the applications are located at each customers site. SaaS delivers application in a model close to one-to-many including partnering, pricing, architecture and management characteristics which is different from packaged software solutions where application delivery is one-to-one. Feature updating in SaaS is central thus remove the need for upgrades and patches downloads which is the case with packaged software solutions. SaaS delivers application functionality via a subscription model over the web. Customers do have to own the software as it is in packaged software solutions, but they instead rent a complete software solution which is remotely delivered. With SaaS, Customers can experience reduced support costs since they no longer need to offer support for different versions and platforms. Question 4: Consider ITSPs business model, the services they provide to their customers, and the source of their competitive advantage as compared to Amazon and Google. a) Describe one way that ITSP could use cloud computing to help deliver current products/services in a new way to their clients. A closer look at what Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers, it would be safe to say that theirs is a Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Googles app engine and Gmail are

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both Cloud Platform as a Service and Cloud Software as a Service respectively. ITSPs extensive experience in offering Cross-Industry Services and Industry- Specific Services and their large clientele base, which I consider its competitive advantage, ITSP can maximize on this advantage by offering their clients a complete cloud experience encompassing SaaS and IaaS. Through this ITSP will be offering their services and products in a new way.
b) Describe one way that ITSP could use cloud computing to offer new services to their clients.

If ITSP uses either Cloud SaaS or Cloud IaaS, they would be able to offer new products and services to their clients. For example, ITSP can develop new cross-industry software and deploy through the SaaS cloud. In doing this, they would be easily making available a new product to their clients.

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References
Riedl, Leimeister, Bohm, &Yetton. Competing in the Clouds: A Strategic Challenge for ITSP Ltd. Communications of the AIS, 2010 27 (40): pp. 725-742.