Cloud Migration to AWS: Security, Planning, and Recommendations

This report discusses a company's decision to migrate its IT functions to the cloud, focusing on securing shared folders and email with zero downtime. It evaluates various cloud providers like AWS, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Open Cloud, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, and HP Enterprise Converged Infrastructure, recommending Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its security, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. The report outlines a high-level migration plan involving requirement identification, cloud selection, deployment model choice (private cloud for enhanced security), budget allocation, and employee training. The ultimate goal is to enhance data security, improve IT functions, and standardize the IT environment through a well-planned cloud migration strategy.

Running head: NETWORK AND SECURITY
Network and Security
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Various Cloud Providers........................................................................................................2
Recommendation....................................................................................................................4
High Level Plan for Cloud Migration....................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Cloud computing can be simply defined as the hypothesis of information technology,
which is used for enabling the omnipresent access of all the system resources that are
configurable. Moreover, the services that are of high level can also be executed as well as
provisioned with the help of this cloud computing with extremely less managerial effort
(Dinh et al., 2013). This is done on the Internet. This particular practice of cloud computing is
solely reliable on resource sharing for the successful achievement of the scale economies and
coherence. The most significant advantage of cloud computing is that it helps to reduce the
costs of an IT infrastructure.
The following report outlines a brief discussion on any particular company that has
decided to migrate all of their information technology functions to cloud. The CEO of this
company has thus taken the decision for migrating their shared folders and email to a secured
cloud with zero downtime. This report will discuss about the safe and secure cloud providers
and will also provide recommendations. Moreover, a high level plan for the organization will
be stated here.
Discussion
Various Cloud Providers
The CEO of the organization has decided to migrate their shared files and email from
their current infrastructure to any specific cloud infrastructure. They are unsure of the
selection of the cloud infrastructure for their organization. There are various cloud providers
that provide virtualized infrastructures to their clients (Arora, Parashar & Transforming,
2013). These virtualized infrastructures help the clients to outsource their computing
resources and equipments like storage, servers, services and networking. Moreover, these

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cloud providers own as well as maintain all the equipments whenever the specific
requirements are met. While selecting a suitable cloud provider for the company, a specific
range of cloud services should be checked for considering the management functionalities,
identification of management, monitoring of tools and support of customers.
Various cloud service providers for infrastructure are available in the market
(Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). The most popular cloud infrastructure providers are given
below:
i) Amazon Web Services or AWS: This is the first and the most significant IaaS
provider that provides on demand instances and services like Amazon Elastic Map Reduce,
Elastic Block Storage and Cluster GPU (Amazon Web Services, Inc., 2018). The message
passing, search service, archival storage and in memory caching service are the major
services provided by AWS.
ii) Windows Azure: This is the second type of IaaS provider for the company that
solely offers easy access to the virtualized networks, message queries and any kind of non-
relational storage platform.
iii) Google Compute Engine: This is the third option for IaaS. It is the best option for
data warehousing, analytical focused applications, big data applications and higher
performance computing (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). Any type of Google services are
well integrated with this provider.
iv) Rackspace Open Cloud: It offers major services of cloud computing by focusing
on the customer services. Moving into the private and hybrid cloud can be easily and
systematically done with this particular IaaS (Hashizume et al., 2013).

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v) IBM SmartCloud Enterprise: It offers core storage and computing services with
the asset catalogue of software for both IBM and non-IBM. Virtual machines can easily be
deployed with this cloud provider.
vi) HP Enterprise Converged Infrastructure: This cloud is solely built on the
OpenStack and the infrastructure service is the part of the company’s Converged Cloud
Solutions for all the three public, private and hybrid (Jain & Paul, 2013).
Recommendation
The most suitable cloud provider for this particular company of the case study would
be Amazon Web Services or AWS. This particular type of cloud provider has various
important benefits (Amazon Web Services, Inc., 2018). They are as follows:
i) Limited Capacity of Hardware and Storage: This is the most important advantage
of Amazon Web Services. A limited capacity of storage and hardware is required in this
cloud and thus overspending is reduced.
ii) Improvement of IT Functions: The organization wants to shift their IT functions
for removing the complexities of information technology functionalities and thus improving
them (Manvi & Shyam, 2014).
iii) Standardized IT Environment: AWS provides standardized IT environment for
proper training and security.
iv) Data Privacy and Security: This is the fourth important advantage of AWS. The
data security and privacy is the first and the foremost criteria for any type of IT functions
migration (Yang & Jia, 2013). AWS provides high security to its data and information and
thus the confidentiality and integrity is not lost.

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v) Cost Effective: Another most significant benefit of AWS is that it is extremely cost
effective and thus could be easily afforded by all organizations irrespective of its size.
vi) Flexibility: AWS infrastructure is extreme flexible and can be utilized by any
company effectively.
vii) Scalability and Elasticity: The other advantages of the infrastructure of Amazon
Web Services are scalability and elasticity (Wei et al., 2014). This particular infrastructure is
extremely scalable and elastic and is thus widely accepted by all.
Thus, the best recommended infrastructure for the organization is Amazon Web
Services or AWS. This infrastructure would be extremely beneficial for the organization as
they are concerned about the data security.
High Level Plan for Cloud Migration
The cloud migration of the company should be done perfectly (Dinh et al., 2013). The
high level plan for cloud migration of this organization is given below:
Step 1: The first step is to identify the requirements of cloud migration. They want to
migrate their email and shared folders to cloud for security of their data and gain benefits
from cloud.
Step 2: The second step is to select the perfect cloud for the organization. The
recommended cloud for this particular organization is Amazon Web Services or AWS
(Hashizume et al., 2013). This cloud would be providing virtualized infrastructure to the
organization cost effectively and also by providing data security.
Step 3: The third step is select a proper deployment model for their cloud. Three
specific types of cloud deployment models are available and they are the private cloud, public
cloud and hybrid cloud. Since, the organization is concerned for the security of their data;

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they should opt for private cloud (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). This private cloud allows
data access to only a restricted group of authorized users.
Step 4: The fourth step in this plan is to make the budget. The entire migration should
be done by strictly followed by this budget.
Step 5: The final step in the high level plan of migration to cloud is to notify all the
employees to maintain and follow all the regulations and rules of cloud.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion it can be concluded that cloud computing is the
practice of an information technology that are used for making all the system resources
available as well as accessible to the clients perfectly. The effort that is required for executing
any type of data access is very less when it is done by cloud computing. It is defined as the
safest mode of transferring data on the Internet and making them available for the clients. it is
extremely reliable and cost effective, thus could be utilized by everyone. There are various
important and significant benefits of cloud computing like flexibility, scalability and
reduction of IT infrastructure expenses. There are various cloud providers that provide cloud
to various organizations. The above report has explained about the problems in the case study
of an organization. Currently this organization is utilizing MS Exchange for their email and
comprises of 12 servers of file for their internal shares. The company wants to shift their IT
functions from the existing infrastructure to cloud. This report has provided recommendations
about cloud providers and which would be better for the company. Furthermore, an extremely
higher level plan for data security of the company is also provided in this particular report.

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References
Amazon Web Services, Inc., (2018). Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Cloud Computing
Services. [online] Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/ [Accessed 30 Mar. 2018].
Arora, R., Parashar, A., & Transforming, C. C. I. (2013). Secure user data in cloud computing
using encryption algorithms. International journal of engineering research and
applications, 3(4), 1922-1926.
Dinh, H. T., Lee, C., Niyato, D., & Wang, P. (2013). A survey of mobile cloud computing:
architecture, applications, and approaches. Wireless communications and mobile
computing, 13(18), 1587-1611.
Fernando, N., Loke, S. W., & Rahayu, W. (2013). Mobile cloud computing: A survey. Future
generation computer systems, 29(1), 84-106.
Hashizume, K., Rosado, D. G., Fernández-Medina, E., & Fernandez, E. B. (2013). An
analysis of security issues for cloud computing. Journal of internet services and
applications, 4(1), 5.
Jain, R., & Paul, S. (2013). Network virtualization and software defined networking for cloud
computing: a survey. IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(11), 24-31.
Manvi, S. S., & Shyam, G. K. (2014). Resource management for Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) in cloud computing: A survey. Journal of Network and Computer
Applications, 41, 424-440.
Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation,
management, and security. CRC press.

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Wei, L., Zhu, H., Cao, Z., Dong, X., Jia, W., Chen, Y., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2014). Security
and privacy for storage and computation in cloud computing. Information
Sciences, 258, 371-386.
Yang, K., & Jia, X. (2013). An efficient and secure dynamic auditing protocol for data
storage in cloud computing. IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed
systems, 24(9), 1717-1726.