Management Information Systems

This article covers various topics related to Management Information Systems, including cloud computing, top cloud service providers, major data breaches, financial fraud, and big data. It explains the three major types of cloud services and four cloud deployment models, along with examples of major cloud service providers. It also describes five major data breaches in the last five years and how organizations find out about them. Additionally, it discusses financial fraud and how to prevent it, with an example of a financial fraud that resulted from a data breach. Finally, it explains the characteristics of big data and how it is typically handled to derive benefits for the user, with an example of how big data is used in banking.

Running head: MANAGEMENT INFORMATTION SYSTEMS
Management Information Systems
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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1. Explain what is meant by cloud computing and why it is attractive to businesses. What
are the three major types of cloud services and four cloud deployment models? Explain.
Mention any special features on these. Give examples of major cloud service providers.
Answer: Cloud computing is the paradigm of information technology, which enables
universal access to all the shared pools of configurable system resources and the higher level
services, which can be frequently provisioned with limited management effort, often over the
Internet1. This cloud computing usually relies on the sharing of resources for the achievement
of economy of scale and coherence, which is similar to any type of utility. The third party
clouds usually enable all the organizations in focusing on the main businesses instead of
wasting the resources on computer maintenance and infrastructure. Avoidance or
minimization of the information technology infrastructure costs are done with the help of
cloud computing2. It is much popular for the organizations or businesses and is easily
acceptable by them. The supporters of cloud computing claim that it allows all the
organizations or companies to improve the manageability of cloud. The three major types of
cloud services are the Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a
Service.
Infrastructure as a service: IaaS is the specific type of cloud computing service,
which provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. In an IaaS model, a cloud
1 Zissis, Dimitrios, and Dimitrios Lekkas. "Addressing cloud computing security issues." Future Generation
computer systems 28, no. 3 (2012): 583-592.
2 Xu, Xun. "From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing." Robotics and computer-integrated
manufacturing 28, no. 1 (2012): 75-86.

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provider hosts all the components of the infrastructure that are present in the data centre. This
data centre includes the storage, servers and networking hardware.
Platform as a service: Platform as a service or PaaS is a cloud computing model in
which a third-party provider delivers software and hardware usually those required for the
application development to all the users over the internet. A PaaS provider always hosts
software and the hardware on its own infrastructure3.
Software as a service: Software as a service or SaaS is a type of cloud service model
alongside infrastructure as a service or IaaS and platform as a service or PaaS4. SaaS
eradicates the requirement of the installation and running of the applications on their own
computers or in their own data centres. The main advantage of this service model is that it
eradicates the cost of hardware provision, maintenance and acquisition, along with the
software installation, support and licensing.
The four deployment models of cloud computing are as follows:
i) Private Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is usually provisioned for the exclusive
utilization by any one organization that comprises of multiple consumers like business units5.
3 Chen, Deyan, and Hong Zhao. "Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud computing." In Computer
Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International Conference on, vol. 1, pp. 647-651. IEEE,
2012.
4 Zissis, Dimitrios, and Dimitrios Lekkas. "Addressing cloud computing security issues." Future Generation
computer systems 28, no. 3 (2012): 583-592.
5 Goyal, Sumit. "Public vs private vs hybrid vs community-cloud computing: a critical review." International
Journal of Computer Network and Information Security 6, no. 3 (2014): 20.

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ii) Public Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open utilization by the
public. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.
iii) Hybrid Cloud: The mixture two other clouds is known as hybrid cloud. It is
expensive, however, since it is comprised of two types of clouds, it has the advantages of
both the clouds.
iv) Community Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive
utilization by any specific community of customers from various organizations that have the
shared concerns like policy, requirements of security, mission, and compliance
considerations6.
There are various and several cloud service providers available in the market. The
major cloud service providers are as follows:
i) Amazon Web Services
ii) Microsoft Azure
iii) Google Cloud Platform
iv) Adobe
v) VMware
vi) IBM Cloud
vii) Rackspace
viii) Red Hat.
6 Rong, Chunming, Son T. Nguyen, and Martin Gilje Jaatun. "Beyond lightning: A survey on security
challenges in cloud computing." Computers & Electrical Engineering 39, no. 1 (2013): 47-54.

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These above mentioned cloud computing companies or cloud service providers help
the organizations or businesses to attain their organizational goals or objectives.
2. Describe the cloud services offered by top tier cloud service providers Amazon, Google
and Microsoft. Details on their top tier services by name are essential for each of these
providers. For example, Amazon provides S3 storage.
Answer: The most important and popular cloud service providers are the Amazon
Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure7. Apart from these three cloud
computing services, there are few other cloud services. However, these are more popular than
the rest.
Google Cloud Platform: The most popular products of this particular cloud service
provider are the Google Compute Engine, which is the Infrastructure as a Service providing
virtual machines, Google App Engine or Platform as a Service for application hosting, Big
Query or Software as a service large scale database analytics and Google Cloud Functions
like in beta testing8.
Amazon Web Services: The most popular products of this particular cloud service
provider are the computation, storage, Amazon EC2 Virtual Cloud Servers, analytics, mobile
services, networking and content delivery, Amazon Cloud Front Global Content Delivery
Network, Amazon Route 53 Scalable Domain Name System, AWS Identity and Access
Management Manage User Access and Encryption Keys. Amazon Web Services was used by
7 Rong, Chunming, Son T. Nguyen, and Martin Gilje Jaatun. "Beyond lightning: A survey on security
challenges in cloud computing." Computers & Electrical Engineering 39, no. 1 (2013): 47-54.
8 Goyal, Sumit. "Public vs private vs hybrid vs community-cloud computing: a critical review." International
Journal of Computer Network and Information Security 6, no. 3 (2014): 20.

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several popular organizations and thus this can be claimed as one of the most popular cloud
services in the field of cloud computing.
Microsoft Azure: The most popular products of this particular cloud service provider
are the Virtual Machines Provision Windows and Linux virtual machines in seconds, Azure
free account, Virtual Network Provision private networks, optionally connect to on-premises
data centres. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building,
testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of
Microsoft-managed data centres.
The above three cloud services are extremely popular for all organizations and they
are utilized by several and various organizations.
3. In the past five years there have been many data breaches resulting in millions of
records being compromised. Many of the breaches have involved credit card related PII
being released without authorization. Describe five major breaches in the last five years
that have involved some or all of the details described above in this question. Identify in
your answer how these organizations find out about the breaches and what legal
regulations govern them with respect to notifications.
Answer: Data breaches have become one of the major problems in the modern world.
These breaches have resulted in crashing all of the confidential information and data9. In the
last five years, five most significant and shocking threats or breaches have shaken the entire
world. The five data breaches in the last five years with relevant details are as follows:
9 Romanosky, Sasha, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti. "Empirical analysis of data breach
litigation." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74-104.

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i) Year 2013 Facebook breach: In June 2013, Facebook disclosed that approximately
six million Facebook users had telephone numbers and personal email addresses present.
They were publicly shared and hackers were exploiting them10. One of the security researcher
founded about this breach and reported to the administrator of Facebook and thus this breach
and fixed and stopped.
ii) Year 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment: In the year 2014, Sony Pictures
Entertainment faced one of the major and significant data breaches. The employees at Sony,
had their screens hijacked by hackers. The screens displayed a grinning skull. The hackers
were known as the Guardians of Peace and they were responsible for stealing over 100
terabytes of confidential data11. The security team of the company were quick at finding out
about the security breach and they quickly fixed this problem.
iii) Year 2015 Premera Data Breach: 2015 was one of the black years for the security
system of the world. In March 2015, Premera announced that they have noticed a major data
breach that has eventually affected eleven million clients in the health industry. However,
they found out or detected about the data breach and were able to solve the problem quickly.
iv) Year 2016 Centene data breach: In January 2016, Centene announced that more
than 950,000 members were impacted due to a major data breach. The breach resulted in the
loss of the six major hard drives that had all the health information of those particular
members. It even had all the personal and confidential information of those members.
10 Sabau, Andrei Sorin. "Survey of clustering based financial fraud detection research." Informatica
Economica 16, no. 1 (2012): 110.
11 West, Jarrod, and Maumita Bhattacharya. "Intelligent financial fraud detection: a comprehensive
review." Computers & Security 57 (2016): 47-66.

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v) Year 2017 Verizon data breach: In July 2017, Verizon organization of the United
states of America suffered one of the major data breach. All the personal information of about
14 million customers was exposed in the cloud12. The organization however checked and
stopped the data breach as soon as possible. Legal steps were also taken for this particular
breach.
4. Financial fraud is a consequence of many breaches. How does this occur and how to
prevent financial frauds occurring after a breach. Give an example of a financial fraud
that is the result of a data breach. Does every breach have a financial motivation? Explain
with example.
Answer: Financial fraud is a major consequence of most of the data breaches.
Financial fraud in the intentional act of deception that mainly involves financial transactions
for the purpose of personal gain. There are four major types of financial frauds in any
business. They include embezzlement, internal theft, payoffs, kickbacks, and skimming. One
of the major data breaches that occurred due to financial fraud is the case of Uber13. The
breach that affected more than 57 million drivers and customers occurred in the year 2016.
The hackers were paid 100,000 dollars for deleting all the data. The personal information
included names, bank account numbers, mobile numbers and email addresses of the
12 Romanosky, Sasha, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti. "Empirical analysis of data breach
litigation." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74-104.
13 Romanosky, Sasha, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti. "Empirical analysis of data breach
litigation." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74-104.

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customers. All the data breaches do not have a financial motivation14. Some of the data
breaches mainly occur due to the dangerous and threatening intentions of the hackers.
5. Describe the characteristics of a Big Data and what distinguishes it from an ordinary
dataset. How it is typically handled to derive benefits for the user? Give an example that
shows how Big Data is used in banking.
Answer: Big data are data sets that are utilized for revealing patterns, trends and
associations15. The main challenges of big data include data analysis, data
search, sharing, storage, and transfer and information privacy. There are three dimensions to
big data known as the 3Vs or Volume, Variety and Velocity.
Big data is absolutely dissimilar from an ordinary data set. The management of
massive amount of data and the innovation of data as become an extremely tedious job for all
organizations. This is done simply by leveraging all the collaborative efforts and talent of the
resources and the people16. This can be fulfilled by the implementation of the big data and its
tools that are capable in storing, analyzing and processing bulk amount of data at an
extremely fast pace as compared to the traditional data processing systems. The traditional
data use centralized database architecture in which large and complex problems are solved by
14 Sabau, Andrei Sorin. "Survey of clustering based financial fraud detection research." Informatica
Economica 16, no. 1 (2012): 110.
15 John Walker, Saint. "Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think." (2014): 181-
183.
16 McAfee, Andrew, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Thomas H. Davenport. "Big data: the management
revolution." Harvard business review 90, no. 10 (2012): 60-68.

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a single computer system. Centralised architecture is costly and ineffective to process large
amount of data. The solution to a problem is computed by several different computers present
in a given computer network. The computers communicate to each other in order to find the
solution to a problem17. Examples of the unstructured data include Relational Database
System (RDBMS) and the spreadsheets, which only answers to the questions about what
happened. Big data uses the semi-structured and unstructured data and improves the variety
of the data gathered from different sources like customers, audience or subscribers18.
Big Data is utilized in banking sectors. The five most common examples of use cases
where banks and financial services firms are finding value in big data analytics are as
follows:
i) Fraud Detection: Banks and financial services firms use analytics to differentiate
fraudulent interactions from legitimate business transactions. By applying analytics and
machine learning, they are able to define normal activity based on a customer's history and
distinguish it from unusual behaviour indicating fraud.
ii) Customer Segmentation: Banks have been under pressure to change from product-
centric to customer-centric businesses. One way to achieve that transformation is to better
understand their customers through segmentation19.
17 Chen, Hsinchun, Roger HL Chiang, and Veda C. Storey. "Business intelligence and analytics: From big data
to big impact." MIS quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012).
18 McAfee, Andrew, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Thomas H. Davenport. "Big data: the management
revolution." Harvard business review 90, no. 10 (2012): 60-68.
19 McAfee, Andrew, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Thomas H. Davenport. "Big data: the management
revolution." Harvard business review 90, no. 10 (2012): 60-68.

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6. Big Data applications are quite prevalent in medicine. Identify applications in medicine
based on the material covered in class about this topic.
Answer: Big Data applications are useful in medicine or medical field. The
applications that are utilized medicine are as follows:
i) Analyzing Electronic Health Records (EHRs): Doctors that are sharing EHRs can
aggregate and analyze data for trends that can reduce healthcare costs. Sharing data between
physicians and healthcare providers as they examine patients can reduce duplicate tests and
improve patient care20.
ii) Control Data for Public Health Research: The medical profession is drowning in
data. Medical offices and hospitals submit data about medical conditions and immunizations,
but without big data, those data are meaningless21. Using analytics normalizes raw patient
data to fill gaps in public health records that can affect regulations as well as providing better
care.
20 Murdoch, Travis B., and Allan S. Detsky. "The inevitable application of big data to health care." Jama 309,
no. 13 (2013): 1351-1352.
21 John Walker, Saint. "Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think." (2014): 181-
183.

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References
Chen, Deyan, and Hong Zhao. "Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud
computing." In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012
International Conference on, vol. 1, pp. 647-651. IEEE, 2012.
Chen, Hsinchun, Roger HL Chiang, and Veda C. Storey. "Business intelligence and analytics:
From big data to big impact." MIS quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012).
Goyal, Sumit. "Public vs private vs hybrid vs community-cloud computing: a critical
review." International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security 6, no. 3
(2014): 20.
John Walker, Saint. "Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and
think." (2014): 181-183.
McAfee, Andrew, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Thomas H. Davenport. "Big data: the management
revolution." Harvard business review 90, no. 10 (2012): 60-68.
Murdoch, Travis B., and Allan S. Detsky. "The inevitable application of big data to health
care." Jama 309, no. 13 (2013): 1351-1352.
Romanosky, Sasha, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti. "Empirical analysis of data
breach litigation." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 74-104.
Rong, Chunming, Son T. Nguyen, and Martin Gilje Jaatun. "Beyond lightning: A survey on
security challenges in cloud computing." Computers & Electrical Engineering 39, no. 1
(2013): 47-54.
Sabau, Andrei Sorin. "Survey of clustering based financial fraud detection
research." Informatica Economica 16, no. 1 (2012): 110.

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West, Jarrod, and Maumita Bhattacharya. "Intelligent financial fraud detection: a
comprehensive review." Computers & Security 57 (2016): 47-66.
Xu, Xun. "From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing." Robotics and computer-
integrated manufacturing 28, no. 1 (2012): 75-86.
Zissis, Dimitrios, and Dimitrios Lekkas. "Addressing cloud computing security
issues." Future Generation computer systems 28, no. 3 (2012): 583-592.