Cloud Computing by Cisco

Cloud computing paradigm, which the latest technological development in information technology, provide means for government organization and private companies to address the issues of agility of service and to budget issues. Concurrently, new business models based on cloud computing defined debated and implemented in various fields. Forsan Inc. needs to adopt and implement cloud-based services and therefore requires state of the art architecture and cost effective techniques of acquiring and procuring information technology services.

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Forsan Inc. requires Cisco's cloud computing, which will envision public cloud computing and other services which will be delivered via cloud marketplace. Cisco provides virtualization and state of the art cloud services in the market. It provides comprehensive versions of utilization, normalization and mobility of cloud services.

Cisco provides scalable cloud services, therefore enabling the company which hires it services to be assured in terms of reliability. It also provides interoperability and federation through network enablement on several marketplace clouds. It brings vital unified technology building blocks and framework which will fundamentally allow adoption of cloud computing to Forsan Inc.

Cisco's cloud is based on integrated, unified and unique approach, which is able to address Forsan Inc. cloud migration requirements. Moreover, Cisco has in-depth understanding of cloud computing adoption challenges such as security, ecosystem, standardization and trust. It brings not only state of the art cloud technology and concept, but also vital partnerships and standards to handle the challenges. Simply, Cisco techniques of adopting cloud computing is a coordinated approach, from both IT strategy and technology.

Cisco's definition and benefits of cloud computing

According to Cisco, cloud computing is defined by its three basic attributes which are; on-demand, at-scale and multitenant environment. On-demand implies that the cloud resources are available instantly when the client requires, and released when the client no longer needs it and the bill is specifically when on use. At-scale implies that the cloud services gives an illusion of infinite resource availability for the purposes of meeting the all kinds of demands from the client.

Some of the benefits that clients get from using Cisco cloud services include

Reduced cost: this refers to both OpEx and CapEx. In regards to CapEx, Forsan Inc. will only have to spend in required capacity increment therefore does not need to build infrastructure for burst capacity. For OpEx, Cisco cloud computing will enable Forsan Inc. to reduce operation and maintenance cost.

Flexibility: Forsan Inc. will derive flexibility benefit from rapid migration or reallocation of workload and rapid provision of new capacity. Cisco will facilitate agility in terms of acquisition and procurement process and timelines.

Improved automation: Cisco is among the world's leading IT companies. As such, they are in a position to acquire state of the art infrastructure which can enable them to provide highly automated CLOUD services. This feature offers profound efficiency.

Focus on critical competency: Forsan Inc. can take advantage of the high automated cloud services offered by Cisco to leverage its provision of services to its clients.

Sustainability: with Ciscos ability to acquire state of the art IT infrastructure, it does not suffer from poor energy efficiency in their data centers, Forsan Inc. will indirectly be operating in economically and environmentally sustainable environment.

Cloud computing type

The most appropriate cloud type for Forsan Inc. is virtual private cloud. It allows the cloud service providers to provide unique service to private cloud users. Virtual private enables the Forsan Inc. to use infrastructure services as part of its private cloud. Virtual private cloud has be ability to augment at-scales and on-demand features with private cloud. Forsan Inc. will be able to extend the trust boundaries such as control, security, compliance and service-level management.

In regards to complexities of workload migration and related data from private to cloud Cisco has developed a unique set of its cloud capabilities in the form of solutions and protocol, which mobility of long-distance scenarios from private to virtual private clouds.

Application to be migrated

To choose which application are fit for the cloud, select application with under-utilized assets; these are applications that are can possibly have immediate business need to expand and can run out of capacity; applications with architectural flexibility; applications that are used by partners; applications that uses traditional tape drives to backup data; and applications that needs global scale for instance advertising apps and customer-facing marketing. Examples of application that can be migrated include batch processing applications, backup systems, development, and testing and build system, log processing systems, queuing systems, training and pre-sales demo systems or content management systems. The application which can remain in-house includes HR service, ERP systems, backend billing systems CRM systems and customer-facing web application (VeltE, Velte & Elsenpeter, 2009) .

Cloud migration process

It is obvious that migration to Cisco virtual private cloud increases business agility and lowers the cost of infrastructure. For Forsan Inc. to migrate successfully, they have to consider three things. These are its application architecture complexity, how much effort they are willing to put and how loosely coupled their applications is. Research shows that the most effective way that Forsan Inc. can follow is step by step approach. They also need to invest both resources and time so that they create a project which is proof of concept. This will enable Forsan Inc. to realize the tremendous Cisco cloud huge potentials and quickly leverage its strength.

Cloud assessment phase

Forsan inc. need to weigh its financial considerations of migrating to cloud-based infrastructure versus co-locted facilities or operating a data centre. They need to collect all the necessary data required for suitable comparison. The key TCO technique uses company data and user-defined inputs to initial cost of owning, operating and maintaining information infrastructure versus Cisco pay-for-costs.

Forsan inc. needs to conduct technical examination to comprehend the application which is appropriate for cloud architecture. Forsan needs to determine which applications to be migrated to cloud first, which application should remain in-house and which application will be moved later. This is achiever by creating a dependency tree and a classification then perfom a detailed assessment of the logical structure of Forsan enterprise applications and classifies the application basing on the risks, security and compliance requirements and dependencies (TOGRAPH & MORGENS, 2008).

Proof of concept phase

Once Forsan inc. has selected the right application to be migrated and produce and estimate of the resources and effort required, it provides a prototype to proof the concept. The objective of this stage is to understand the Cisco and to ensure that its assumptions in regards cloud migration suitability are accurate. This stage can be achieved by migration a few applications to the cloud.

Data migration phase

In this phase, Forsan inc enterprise architecture to explore the different storage options available in Cisco cloud, the different relational database management system options, segmentation strategy and the effort required to migrate all its data to cloud.

Application migration

This phase involves determining how part of the entire system could be moved to the cloud without interruption or disruption of the current day to day services of Forsan Inc. it can implement either hybrid migration or Forklift migration strategy (Kundra, 2011). Forsan Inc needs to look at the disadvantages and advantages of each strategy to assist in deciding the best strategy that fits the companys application. The decision on which strategy to use is based on the applications the company has decided to migrate.

Leveraging the cloud

After the company has migrated all the applications, tests are run to ensure that all the application are working well. It is advisable to invest resources and time in order to determine the way of leveraging clouds additional benefits.

Optimization phase

In this phase, the Forsan inc. needs to focus on how it can optimize its cloud-based application for it to increase cost savings. Since Forsan inc. is billed for only the resources consumed, it should make efforts to optimize its systems at all means. Often, the company needs to realize optimization value immediately. Research has shown that huge sums of money can be saved through small optimization.

Hardware, software and architecture requirement

Forsan inc. do not need extra hardware software or architecture requirements since cloud computing provided these services through Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (Iaa) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cisco cloud cost benefits

At my company level, the benefits of the cloud will be geared to encourage Forsan Inc business to migrate to new levels of systems and infrastructures which have never been in use before. Beside direct cost benefits, there will be concentration on upgradability and economies of scale of ICT infrastructure. Basically, if software and storage will be handled by the cloud, they will no longer need to purchase expensive servers and large data storage devices. They will rent storage of space depending on the amount of data they need to store and its future prospect. Scalability will be automatically handled by the cloud service providers making office computer setup extremely simple due to availability of auto-detect services such as Microsoft office 365, which takes away the need to setup a network of the servers and import settings internally. The security of its data will also improve since the business data will be hosted by cloud service providers with greater capabilities of protecting it. In addition, these cloud service providers will be able to localize issues such as natural disaster or fire which can destroy my data (Khajeh-Hosseini 2010). This is because cloud computing provides always-on nature due to frequent data backup. Since the officer will be using a single system and upgrading will be automatic, there will be no need for training since the environment will always remain consistent.

References

Velte, T., Velte, A., & Elsenpeter, R. (2009). Cloud computing, a practical approach. McGraw-Hill, Inc..T OGRAPH, B., & MORGENS, Y. R. (2008). Cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 51(7).

Khajeh-Hosseini, A., Greenwood, D., & Sommerville, I. (2010, July). Cloud migration: a case study of migrating an enterprise IT system to IaaS. In Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on (pp. 450-457). IEEE.

Buyya, R., Broberg, J., & Goscinski, A. M. (Eds.). (2010). Cloud computing: principles and paradigms (Vol. 87). John Wiley & Sons.Kundra, V. (2011). Federal cloud computing strategy.