Proposed Architectures for a Hybrid Cloud: Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services

Question 1 – Proposed architectures for a hybrid cloud
A cloud architecture can be defined as the components as well as the subcomponents, which
are required in the process of, cloud computing. These components comprise of front end working
platform such as fat clients, thin clients as well as mobile devices and back end working platforms such
as servers and storage devices. A cloud network such as internet is also a part of the network
architecture.
Fig 1: Details description of a cloud architecture (Source: As used by author)
Architectures to be deployed:
1. Microsoft Azure: Smith securities ltd wants to replace all the personal computers of its
employees with mobile devices like laptops that can use citrix receivers for remote services
using Microsoft Azure, which is one of the most widely known and accepted cloudy service
models. The company should incorporate it because it is an extremely beneficial cloud service
with different advantages. It is created by Microsoft for testing, managing, building as well as
deploying services and their applications through a widespread global network. This network
consists of data centers managed by Microsoft. It provides useful software’s such as a service
(SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well as platform as a service (PaaS). It supports
different third party programing languages and frameworks as well (Barga et al., 2015)

Benefits of using Microsoft Azure:
- It is fast: It has a tremendous speed of deployment, operation as well as scalability
- Better agility in business: It gives a much faster cycle of development and a calculated
suitability without a much expensive outlay, thereby giving smith’s security a financial
advantage.
- It can cater to the global reach: It has the benefit of adapting in accordance with
organization performance as well as utilization requirements on a global scale.
Fig 2: Internet of things model by Microsoft Azure (Source: As used by the author).
Issues associated with Azure:
- Careful application integration: The impact especially in the domains such as Payment
gateways, Third-party vendors, External storage, SMTP servers as well as Web services
should be well analyzed before implementing Azure. This can lead to performance lags as
well as data insecurity (Copeland et al., 2015).
- Staff management: New efficient management techniques need to be explained to the
employees since both in-home and cloud-based systems have to be handled. Applications as
well and their drivers have to be changed which have to be trained to the web developers
before development and implementation.

2. Amazon web services: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a part of ecommerce giant Amazon.com,
which provides cloud computing as well as cloud storage platforms to different companies, on a
basis of paid subscription which allows computers to be managed remotely. Smith security
should use it since is an extremely cost effective cloud based solution that can be used by the
companies. Another reason why it will be used is that the company is planning to replace the
personal computers of the employees by AWS using thin client devices. Therefore, data security
should be very strong on these devices, which can be ensured by using AWS.
The basic structure of Amazon elastic compute cloud (EC2) allows the usage of virtual
machines, store and retrieve data using application program interface (API) calls, according to
the user/company requirements (Wu & Madhyastha, 2013).
Fig 3: AWS architecture for EC2 (Source: As used by the company)
Benefits of using AWS: