Cloud Computing: Selection of Cloud Architectures for a Hybrid Cloud and Risks Associated with Hybrid Cloud and Microservices Strategy

Running head: CLOUD COMPUTING
Cloud Computing
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................. 2
Discussion.................................................................................................................................2
1. Selection of Cloud Architectures for a Hybrid Cloud and the Reasons for the
Deployment..........................................................................................................................2
2. Benefits and Issues for the Deployment of the Selected Cloud Architectures.................4
3. Risks Associated with Hybrid Cloud and Micro services Strategy with their Controls......5
4. Information Security Steps and controls for Securing Hybrid Cloud.................................9
5. Business Continuity Planning for Hybrid Cloud and Micro services Approach...............11
6. Remote Server Administration, Resource Management and SLA Management............13
7. Migration to AWS Services.............................................................................................13
8. Critical Points and Issues for these Steps.......................................................................14
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 15
References..............................................................................................................................17

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Introduction
Regional Gardens Ltd is a specific organization, which is responsible for running a
number of gardening enterprises. This particular organization has a huge display garden,
which it would be opening for the purpose of public inspection various number of times in
one year. Moreover, all other infrastructures would be moved into the cloud (Dinh et al.,
2013). They have taken the exclusive decision to initially move their Web services within the
cloud for providing an incremented level of HA or high availability and the better degree of
flexibility or scalability for the purpose of supplying data to all the employees or customers.
The various security risks or threats that are possible for their selected Hybrid Cloud should
be mitigated on time.
The following report outlines a brief discussion on the implementation of cloud
within the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd. Various significant details will be provided
in this report. A specific risk and security workshop for assessing the risks, several methods
to control these risks will also be provided here. Moreover, the BCP or business continuity
plan will also be given here. All the cloud architectures for this organization and the most
suitable architecture will be provided here. Moreover, the critical points or issues will also
be provided here.
Discussion
1. Selection of Cloud Architectures for a Hybrid Cloud and the Reasons for the Deployment
There are various important and significant cloud architectures that would be helpful
for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013). The
three significant types of cloud architecture models are Infrastructure as a service or IaaS,

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platform as a service or PaaS and software as a service or SaaS. All of these cloud
architecture models are extremely important for any organization as they help to reduce the
complexities of cloud services to a greater level. Regional Gardens Ltd. have decided to shift
to the hybrid cloud model. Hence they should be selecting such cloud architectures that are
the most suitable for their hybrid cloud approach (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). The
proposed cloud architecture for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd for their hybrid
cloud is PaaS or platform as a service.
PaaS or platform as a service is the platform based category of the various cloud
computing services, which is responsible for providing the platform and enabling the clients
or customers for developing, running and finally managing all the applications without any
type of complexity to build or maintain the basic infrastructure associated with the
development as well as launching of the application (Hashem et al., 2015). This platform as a
service could be eventually delivered in three ways. They are as a typical public cloud service
from the provider, where the consumer has the capability in controlling the software
deployment with minimum options of configuration and providing various networks,
operating system, storage and servers. The second method for delivering a platform as a
service is as a private service like appliance or software within the firewall and the final
method is as the software that is being deployed on any public IaaS or infrastructure as a
service. The main reason for proposing platform as a service is that it could be easily
implemented within the hybrid cloud. Since, they have decided to shift to hybrid cloud; PaaS
would be the bezst optrion for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd (Li et al., 2013). The
best example of platform as a service model or PaaS model is AWS or Amazon Web Services.
Hence, PaaS should be selected by this organization.

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2. Benefits and Issues for the Deployment of the Selected Cloud Architectures
There are various benefits as well as issues for deploying the platform as a service
within the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd. The major benefits for selecting this cloud
architecture are given below:
i) Faster in Nature: The first and the foremost advantage of the deployment of
platform as a service or PaaS is that it is extremely faster in nature. All the applications
would be eventually functioning properly as the service offerings (Garg, Versteeg & Buyya,
2013). Each and every hybrid platform as a service subsequently simplifies the entire
procedure of the deployment of applications, scaling and management is checked with the
help of this platform as a service. The developer productivity is properly incremented with
this process.
ii) Streamlining Application Management: The second important benefit of the
hybrid platform as a service is the proper streamlining of application management. For any
hybrid cloud, streamlining of the application management is mandatory and hence should
be done even for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd (Xiao, Song & Chen, 2013).
Moreover, it helps to gain competitive advantages and access the information technology
infrastructure properly.
iii) Reduction of Complexities and Increment of Agility: The next important
advantages of the hybrid platform as a service cloud architecture is that it helps to reduce
the complexities to a greater level and the agility is eventually increased or incremented
(Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The inheritable cloud architecture is checked in this
phenomenon and thus should be checked properly.

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iv) Cost Effective: The next important advantage of this hybrid platform as a service
cloud architecture for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd is that it is extremely cost
effective and hence could be easily afforded by everyone (Hashizume et al., 2013).
In spite of having all these advantages, there are some of the most significant risks
that are vulnerable for the hybrid platform as a service cloud architecture model. The major
risks are given below:
i) BCP and DR: The first and the foremost disadvantage of the hybrid platform as a
service cloud architecture model for the organization of Regional Gardens Ltd is the
business continuity planning and disaster recovery with the vendor of this platform as a
service (Jain & Paul, 2013). Both of these planning are extremely important for this
particular organization and these are eventually absent within the selected cloud
architecture model.
ii) Lack of SSDLC: Another significant risk within the cloud architecture model of
hybrid platform as a service is that it does not comprise of the secure software development
process life cycle or SSDLC (Yang & Jia, 2013). Due to the absence of secure software
development process life cycle, insecure code occurs within the architecture model.
iii) Lack of Adequate Provisions in SLA: The next risk within the cloud architecture
model is the lack of sufficient provisions in SLA. This is a major security concern for the users
of the cloud and thus Regional Gardens Ltd can be affected in the process.
3. Risks Associated with Hybrid Cloud and Micro services Strategy with their Controls
The hybrid cloud and the micro services strategy are always vulnerable to various
types of security risks and threats for their organization (Krishna, 2013). However, all these