Chapter 6

The chapter begins with why the cloud will be utilize more and more in the future. It will also discuss how technology makes the cloud work and the ways organizations can use it. The chapter goes overs local networks and how it functions with the web. This also includes the purpose of the cloud and its basic technologies. Finally, it will review how each organizations use the cloud, the basic steps of setting up the cloud and its security.
Q1: Why is the cloud the future for most organizations?

Organizations are moving their computing infrastructure to the cloud.  Leasing computing infrastructure from the cloud will become common practice. The cloud itself is an elastic leasing of pooled computer resources via Internet. Elastic means it automatically adjusts for unpredictable demand and limits financial risks. Now pooled is the same physical hardware itself or economies of scale, for instance like Amazon.com’s CloudFront. Without increase in servers, response time of seconds or more, is far too long to maintain attention of viewer. So economies of scale consider the average cost decreases as size of operation increases. The major cloud vendors operate enormous data centers such as web farms. The cloud is preferred to in-house hosting because of the small capital requirements, speedy development and known cost structure. This also includes no obsolescence, superior flexibility and adaptability to grow or fluctuating demand.  However, the negatives of the cloud are dependency on vendors, loss of control over data location and little security measures. The cloud is used now because of cheap processors, essentially free data communication and storage. The cloud also uses virtualization technology, internet-based standards enable flexible and standardized processing capabilities. The cloud doesn’t make sense when the law or standard industry practice require physical control or possession of the data. For instance, a financial institution is legally required to maintain physical control over its data.

Q2: What network technology supports the cloud?

There are four basic types of computer network technology that support the cloud. Personal area network helps devices connected around a single person. The local sear network are computers connected at a single physical site. Wide area network are computers connected between two or more separated sites. Finally, another basic type of network is the internet and internets which is networks of networks. For example, a typical small home office LAN like most computers today would support 10/100/1000 of Ethernet. There are thee various LAN Protocol with different speeds and connections, such as wired or wireless LAN. Also Bluetooth transmits data short distances and can connect to a computer, keyboard, mouse, printer, smartphones and cars. Communications speeds expressed in bits, memory sizes in bytes. For example, communications equipment can be represented by K(ilo) = 1,000, M(ega) = 1,000,000 and G(iga) = 1,000,000,000.  Connecting your LAN to the internet how important ISP functions. The three are to provide legitimate Internet address, provide gateway to Internet and pay access fees and other charges to telecoms. Gateway function is when a ISP receives the communications from your computer and passes them on to the Internet, and receives communications from the Internet and passes them to you.

Q3: How does the cloud work?

The cloud resides in the internet so assume you send a message to a server somewhere. The message is too big to travel in one piece, so it’s broken into packets and each packet passes along from WAN to WAN until it reaches destination. Once all packets arrive, message reconstructed, delivered to server for processing. All accomplished by computers and data communications devices that most likely have not interacted before. Now the hop is the movement from one network to another. Carriers are messages, broken into packets. These Packets move across the Internet, passing through networks owned by telecom carriers. So peering agreements are carriers that freely exchange traffic amongst themselves without paying access fees. Net neutrality principle considers all data is treated both equally however the problem is some people use more bandwidth than others.

IP Addresses and Domain Names:

There are two internet addressing, Public IP addresses and Private IP addresses. Public IP addresses Identifies a unique device on Internet and is assigned by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Private IP addresses identifies a device on a private network, usually a LAN and the assignment LAN is controlled. The purpose is these protocols manage traffic as it passes across an internet /Internet. Most important protocol in transport layer is TCP. Private/public IP address scheme two major benefits attackers cannot send attack packets to private IP addresses. Most common IP addresses format is IPv4. A domain name is a unique name affiliated with a public IP address, dynamic affiliation of domain names with IP addresses and can have multiple domain names for same IP address. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is an Internet address protocol, such as http:// or ftp:// followed by a domain name or public IP address. ICANN administers system for assigning names to IP addresses. Domain name a worldwide-unique name affiliated with a public IP address. Affiliation of domain names with IP addresses is dynamic. Owner of domain name can change affiliated IP addresses at its discretion.

Three Tier Architecture:

Almost all e-commerce applications use a three-tier architecture. First, user tier consists of computers, phones, other devices with browsers that request and process Web pages. Second, a server tier consists of computers running Web servers and application programs. Finally, a database tier consists of computers running a DBMS that processes SQL requests to retrieve and store data. So a commerce server is an application program that runs on server-tier computer. Receives requests from users via Web server, takes some action, and returns a response to users. Typical commerce server functions are to obtain product data from a database, manage items in a shopping cart, and coordinate checkout process. Only Internet protocols a business professional likely to encounter are at application layer. These are four standards that are used extensively for Web services and the cloud: WSDL, SOAP, XML and JSON. 

Four Standards of Web Services and Cloud

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is the standard for describing services, inputs, outputs, other data supported by a Web service. Documents coded machine readable and used by developer tools for creating programs to access the service. SOAP is a protocol for requesting Web services and for sending responses to Web service requests. Extensible Markup Language is used for transmitting documents. Contains metadata to validate format and completeness of a document, includes considerable overhead. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a markup language used for transmitting documents. Contains little metadata. Preferred for transmitting volumes of data between servers and browsers. While notation in format of JavaScript objects, JSON documents can be processed by any language

Q4: How do organizations use the cloud?

Organizations can use the cloud in several different ways. By far most popular, is to obtain cloud services from cloud service vendors. The three fundamental of cloud types are SaaS, PassS and laaS. Content delivery networks from cloud vendors stores user data in many different geographical locations and makes data available on demand. It also can have specialized type of PaaS, but usually considered in its own category, minimizes latency and is used to store and deliver content seldom changed.

Q5: How can Falcon Security use the cloud?

Absent some unknown factor such as a federal tax on Internet traffic. Individuals on iCloud or Google Grid, to small groups using Office 365, to Small companies like Falcon Security Parts using PaaS, to huge organizations using IaaS.

Q6: How can organizations use cloud services securely?

Organizations realize the benefits of cloud technology without succumbing to those threats. VPN technology uses public Internet to create appearance of a private connection on secure network. Virtual means something that appears to exist but, in fact, does not. Remote Access using VPN is an apparent connection as it appears to the remote user. Accessing a private cloud over a virtual private network is when a VPN client software encrypts messages so their contents are protected from invasions. Private clouds provide security within the organizational infrastructure but do not provide secure access from outside that infrastructure. In order to provide such access, organizations set up a VPN and users employ it to securely access the private cloud. Organization can store most sensitive data on own infrastructure, and store less sensitive data on VPC. Thus, organizations required to have physical control over some of their data can place it on own servers and locate rest on VPC.

Q7: 2026?

Cloud services new categories of work that is faster, more secure, easier to use, cheaper. Fewer organizations own their computing infrastructure. More pooling of servers across organizations and overall size of the cloud gets bigger. Individuals, small businesses, large organizations obtain elastic resources at very low cost. Remote action systems: Telediagnosis, Telesurgery and Telelaw enforcement which provide services in dangerous locations.