Technical Management and SLA

Question: Discuss about theTechnical Management and SLA. Answer: Introduction Data is always increasing everyday both in volume and in variety around the globe. It is almost impossible for data describing an entity to be fully housed and controlled by a single data source. Due to this data is combined from various sources and versions of the data by same source for a period of time. During data exchange there is always a risk of data leakage or loss of data confidentiality. These are crucial things that needs to be addressed as the client who own the data being exchanged need to be sure that the network administrator or where the data is stored is safe from expose. The data is at risk from both the cloud host provider and also malicious hackers. The protection mechanisms should ensure data is immune against loss. In the event the immune is compromised the recovery mechanisms need to take charge. A better data backup and disaster recovery mechanism is needed here. During the first presentation it was agreed Intuit QuickBooks and Optus cloud solutions will be adopted. Quick books will be essential in management of payroll and file sharing. It has capacity to conduct 24 hr data protection through automated monitoring as well as server performance monitoring. It captures all user activities at various periods to ensure nothing is unaccounted for. Optus cloud solution was chosen for payroll services due to good security capabilities. It is also less expensive. Remote Administration This mechanism provides tools and interface for external cloud data administrators which allow them configure and offer cloud based IT resources. This mechanism can define access to resource, SLA, billing and administration management features via a portal. Child protection board through remote administration system will be able to have capacity to operate and monitor the service progress. This system architecture of remote administration has an undelaying system that undertake management. The administration controls are centralization and revealed to external cloud resource admin. The external resource administrator is provided with a user console which is interfaced with undelaying management system through APIs (Cioca Ivascu, 2014). The cloud provider uses remote administration tools and API to develop and adapt the online portals to give the cloud consumers a number of administrative controls. Remote system administration creates two portals namely usage and administration portal as well as self-service portal. The latter is a shopping portal to allow the cloud provider clients to search up to date list of available cloud services. The other portal serves as a general purpose portal. Which can be used to configure a leased virtual server which do hosting preparation. This is usual done by a cloud resource admin (CRA). The CRA can then select and request for new cloud service using the self-service portal. This give him/her a chance to access usage and administration portal where he can configure the new cloud service. This service is hosted on a virtual cloud server(Alshammari Bach, 2013). During this process there is remote administration interaction with management system to offer the required actions. The remote administration system offers cloud service set up and configuration, assignment and release of on-demand cloud services IT resources, tracking of cloud service performance, usage and status, management of access through control of authentication and authorization, monitoring of internal and external leased services access as well as capacity planning. Resource Management This helps coordinate the IT resources to respond to actions performed during management of the cloud services which are executed by the client and the service provider. Resource management system has a virtual infrastructure manager that coordinate the virtual server instances with the server hardware components. The virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) coordinates a number of virtualized IT resources among multiple physical servers(IONESCU, 2015). A VIM may have dedicated repositories such VM image repository for operational data storage. Resource management is responsible for management of templates of virtualised IT resource, assignment and release of virtualised IT resources, coordination of IT resources like load balancers, resources replicators and fail-over systems, enforcement of security and usage policies and tracking of IT resource operational conditions. The VIM provides a user interface for cloud resource administrator to perform internal resource management tasks. SLA Management SLA management manages SLA data notification through administration, collection, reporting and storage. It includes a storage repository to extraction of collected SLA data on determined measures and report parameters. A cloud service consumer performs an exchange with the cloud service. Then the SLA intercepts the messages exchanged to use them evaluate interaction as well as perform relevant runtime data. The data is in line to cloud service SLA so as to comply with the quality of service (QOS). This data collected is stored in a storage repository as part of SLA management system. Using the usage and administrator port the cloud resource administrator can now query and generate reports through the user the interface. Figure 3: SLA manager with OOS measurement repository Back up and Disaster Recovery Data exchange and file sharing is a very critical process that needs all tools to be available in case of any eventuality data needs to be recovered fast and ensure no data loss. Information here is the most important factor for child protection board and it must ensure that there is high availability whenever the data is needed. A cloud backup needs to be kept to ensure in the event that the online file is lost the one backup can be used. Backing of the data involves sending a file copy over the network to an off site server for storage. The server here is hosted by the third party usually the cloud provider. A disaster recovery plan needs to set up for anticipation of data loss which will need recovery. Child protection board needs a unique disaster recovery plan as it has its own needs related to childrens data that is similar to no other organization (Singh, Powles, Pasquier, Bacon, 2015). A better recovery plan for them will be based recovery time objectives. Cloud provider reliability and availability is also essential for continued data availability and also for disaster recovery. They are critical in delivering of the service I agreed terms. The recovery options available are managed service provider, backup to cloud and restore to cloud and replication to cloud virtualised machines Managed service provider puts primary production and disaster recovery instances in the cloud which will help the board greatly realise the cloud benefits. This mechanism uses managed applications mechanism which is cloud based hence no on premise infrastructure. Negotiation for appropriate service level agreement which the service provider is very essential as it amounts to giving out control to the service provider. One needs complete assurance on ability to offer un-interfered service within the SLA agreement for disaster recovery instances. A pure cloud play is becoming a popular platform for business application such as email and customer relation management applications. The child protection service can adopt a back-up and restore from cloud. The data and applications which reside on premise is backed up to cloud and restored on premise hardware in the event of failure. The backed up data is the substitute of the tape based off backups Replication to virtual machines in the cloud is another option. Applications may need application awareness, replication and aggressive recovery time and recovery point objectives. Replication protects both cloud and on premise data. It can be done on both cloud VM to cloud VM and still on premises to cloud VM. The products of replication are based on continuous data protection SLA Metrics The quality of service offered by the service provider is defined by the SLA metrics. A quality cloud service may have multiple metrics that form part of the major acceptance criteria. The SLA metric give a guideline to assessment of aspects of the cloud service. Fault tolerance is very critical as the application detects and withstands the failure of some components. This ensured continued service with accurate results for a certain period of time. A reliable application manage failure on its parts and continue working properly. Defect rate metric of the SLA determines the percentage error rate in the major deliverables. This takes into account the number of failures, missed deadlines in a defined period of time usually one month. The child protection board should consider the downtime rate than the service is unavailable and no of times that there file exchange failures (Amato, Liccardo, Rak, Venticinque, 2014). The technical quality of the offered cloud service is of great importance. This includes the bandwidth and speed of connection. The quality of service will help eliminate single points of failure through replication and resilient design. To ensure effective availability each service that depends on another is considered and its effect on the overall system is also considered. This helps in times of disaster management where priority of a resource need to be taken into account System scalability also has a hand in service availability. When the service fails when the load is increased is ceases from being accessible by the consumer. According to SLA scalable application should withstand increased load and show consistency with acceptable results with increase of consumer load. References Alshammari, H. Bach, C. (2013). Administration Security Issues in Cloud Computing.International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services,3(4), 1-11. https://dx.doi.org/10.5121/ijitcs.2013.3401 Amato, A., Liccardo, L., Rak, M., Venticinque, S. (2014). SLA-based negotiation and brokering of cloud resources.International Journal of Cloud Computing,3(1), 24. https://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijcc.2014.058829 Chorafas, D. (2011).Cloud computing strategies. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press. Cioca, L. Ivascu, L. (2014). 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