Regional Gardens Ltd: Cloud Infrastructure, Automation, and SharePoint

This report analyzes the cloud infrastructure needs of Regional Gardens Ltd., a company with multiple gardening enterprises. The report discusses the benefits of moving to a cloud infrastructure to enhance performance, including automation approaches, IAAS, PAAS, and SharePoint collaboration. It examines the current IT infrastructure of Regional Gardens, including their servers and software. The report then delves into automation approaches, comparing ad hoc and structured methods. It further explores IAAS and PAAS, comparing their advantages and disadvantages, and recommends PAAS for Regional Gardens. The final section focuses on SharePoint, comparing IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS features, and considering factors like cost-benefit ratio. The report concludes with a discussion of potential problems and solutions related to implementing cloud infrastructure and SharePoint services for the company's 70 employees.

Running head: MOVING TO CLOUD INFASTRUCTURE
MOVING TO CLOUD INFASTRUCTURE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that associate with number of related gardening
enterprises. It has a hugeexhibition garden which opens for community inspection a number
of times a year. These enterprises contain the Regional Gardens Nursery which vendsgarden
and plants supplies to the public and Regional Garden Planners who provides garden advice,
consultancy services and design. They are advised that move to cloud infrastructure will
enhance their performance. This assignment will widely discussed about the automation
approaches, different type of Cloud infrastructure and SharePoint Collaboration with those
infrastructure.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Section A: Automation Approach..............................................................................................2
Ad hoc Approach...................................................................................................................3
Structured Approach..............................................................................................................4
Section B: Moving Infrastructure to public cloud......................................................................5
IAAS......................................................................................................................................5
PAAS......................................................................................................................................6
Difference...............................................................................................................................8
Recommendation....................................................................................................................9
Section C: Share Point.............................................................................................................11
Problems that Regional Gardens may encounter.................................................................14
Solve the issues....................................................................................................................15
Reference..................................................................................................................................16

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Introduction
Regional Gardens Ltd is a company associated with gardening industry. They have a
large garden that opens for exhibition and public inspection couple of time in a year. They
have several garden enterprise under their supervision. This enterprise incorporates the
Regional Gardens Nursery which offers plants and garden supplies to people in general, and
Regional Garden Planners which gives plant guidance, outline and consultancy
administrations. All of their decisions and management orders come from Bathurst that work
as the main office where all data are stored in a small database. List of their systems is
followed. They have 2 active directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2 with
two 3.6 HZ Xeon X86 processor, 8 GB RAM and low storage 140 GB HDD. They also have
another 3 SQL server that works on windows server 2003 with 2 2.8 GHz Xeon processor, 4
GB RAM, 250 GB RAID-5 array. One exchange 2007 email server 2003 file and print
servers with two 3.6 GHz Xeon, 8 GB RAM and 250 GB RAID-1 array. 4 windows server
200 File and Print servers with two 2.8 GHz X86 Xeon processor, 4 GB RAM and 250 GB
RAID-1 array. For Linux, they have two Red Hat Enterprise five Linux server running
Apache and Tomcat with two 2.8 GHz X86 Xeon processor, 16 GB RAM with 140 GB
HDD.
Section A: Automation Approach
Nowadays Automation in office means is just not to process of mechanizing the tasks,
it includes utilizing computer technologies to automated companies procedures as managing
and storing labor resources and activities lessen the manual intellectual work in management
(Bradford, Earp &Grabski, 2014). It is now possible to transmit and encode data, visual
information and letters in digital form. By utilizing automation telecommunication, data
processing has been measured as different aspects of single information technology rather
than aspects of different fields. Regional Garden Ltd was doing all their management
procedures from Bathurst and all process is handled manually. As their company is growing
their storage and server system is also needed to implement and automated work is required
to manage all information and proper execution.

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Advantages of Automation
Source:(Chang,Kuo& Ramachandran, 2016)
Ad Hoc approach
Ad hoc planning is event specific and highly personalized and task specific. It helps to
organize data and increase the capacity of business activity (Chang, Walters & Wills, 2013).
Utilizing this approach to the business automation to let matter experts organize business
logic provides the higher quality, faster time to market and lower anticipated cost associated
with up-to-date software development.
Benefits:-
Data storage
Information including office records, spreadsheets, primary office forms and the
document will be stored in an efficient manner and easily accessible for regional garden
employees (Chaplin & Gilbert, 2015). Desktop presentation bundles and Word processing
placed graphical data and raw textural while spreadsheets applications can help the company
to engage in the easy manipulation and output of numbers.

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Data Exchange:
The Electronic transfer is the most efficient and effortless way of transferring files.
Automation system allows instantaneous or real-time transfer of information such as
Electronic email, facsimile and voice mail.
Issues:
For implementing this approach lot of budget is required. It is not a suitable option for the
Regional garden to adopt this approach.
• Displacement of people.
• Stressful work environments.
• Assembly or Factory line approach of office work
• Excessive Monitoring of Works
Structured Approach
Structured approach is an effective approach for utilizing the benefits of software
development to business automation. It assists to create the model of the business logic and
test scenarios, store information in a master repository and deploy business automation
elements. This type of automation also helps to alter the quality of work which can bring job
satisfaction by providing meaningful job (Deshpande et al., 2015).
Benefits: Issues:
• Does not need of any extra typists
• Receptionists can spend more time with
clients
• Increase productivity
• It can be used to plan new Strategies
• This automation decreases the number of
clerical.
• Security Aspects
• ROI Estimation
• Quality of Service
• Performance Related Issues
• Integration Related Concerns
Section B: Moving Infrastructure to public cloud
Regional Garden want to move their web infrastructure to public cloud for flexibility
and easy access of primary office document and provide cloud based automation to their staff

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in New South Wales. IAAS and PAAS are the two most efficient cloud services available to
implement their infrastructure into the cloud.
IAAS
Infrastructure as a Service is used for scalable and highly automated computer
resourcesand has the capability of metered, self-provisioned and available on-demand. IAAS
provides cloud services via API or Dashboard that enable direct access over servers and
storage just as traditional servers but with higher level of Scalability (Gupta,
Seetharaman&Raj, 2013). Users can build a Virtual data center and access same files or
technologies without invest in physical maintenance or capacity planning. It is known for
most flexible cloud computing model for storage, networking, processing power and
automated deployment of servers. Lot of service providers such as Exoscale, Softlayer and
Navisite is available for providing infrastructure with their own service portfolio and several
value scheme.
Advantage: Disadvantage:
 Customers have full control over VM
and have the capacity to build their
own VM.
 It also does not need critical planning
and complicated setup to implement
this service as its applications are
simple in use and effective.
 The main advantage is Regional
Garden does not need concern about
the management of application as the
service provider will be manage and
monitor every aspects
 The staffs and manager had no direct
control over the system processing.
 It is most expensive platform as
clients need to lease a tangible
resource.
 It provides little control over upgrade,
deployment and testing methodology.
 Regional garden has different servers
and systems, it is difficult to
synchronize SAAS with other
systems and it is unsupported in most
of the cases with integration of new
systems.
 Cloud provider will gain full access to
customer’s data unless cryptography
is used.

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PAAS
Platform as a Service functionality is slightly lower than SAAS and offers a platform
to develop and deploy software. It also provides clients accessibility over the server software
and underlying server hardware that helps them to focus on more in company’s side of
scalability (Kavis, 2014). There are lot of PAAS providers such as Google App Engine, Red
Hat’s OpenShift and Heroku which built on virtualization technology to requisition resources
as client’s needs.
Benefits
Issues
 It is more cost effective comparison
to IAAS as no leasing of resources is
required only software platform is
essential.
 It provides full control over the
software (unlike SAAS)platform.
 Integration of new systems is not an
issue when using PAAS as a cloud
collaboration platform.
 Minimal management is necessary to
utilize VM as it is the responsibility
of service provider.
 Clients can fully control and run its
own virtual infrastructure without the
maintenance and invest in external
hardware.
 No control over the virtual machine
or processing of data, it could turn to
critical risk as the company has no
awareness of what is happening with
their data.
 The whole platform is shared
platform as different staff can run
different websites on the same IIS
platform.
 Management tasks can be tedious and
time consuming as staff or manager is
responsible for upgrade and update of
applications.
 It does not provide much control over
VM as IAAS.

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SAAS
PAAS
IAAS
Level of Control
Effort to Manage
Difference
Infrastructure as a Service consists with pre-configured hardware via hypervisor or
interface and also no high level software is provided as operating system. While PAAS
provides an operating environmentincludes application services and operating systems
(Kumar, Adlakha& Mukherjee, 2016). It is suitable for companies that are committed to a
given development environment for a given application.
Security: IAAS enables the implementation of third party security onto the purchased
infrastructure it may needs high investments. While in PAAS there is no need of external
security above what the PAAS provides.
Database:IAAS enable the options to choose the desired database as requirement for high-
security data, separate client data or exclusive code storage. While in PAAS this options are
not easily available.
Recommendation
PAAS is highly recommended for regional Garden Ltd. for both cost and work
efficiency. It will be effective to use PAAS a cloud service for providing automation to the
staffs and secure data processing. Storage and server overhead, network bandwidth, software
maintains and lower skill requirement.PAAS can provide greatest flexibility, agility to the
development process.

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Monitoring: Regardless whether using PAAS or IAAS continuous monitoring in cloud is
essential to remain proactive in the aspect of any IT challenges. While using IAAS
management does not need to concern about monitoring as the service provider will manage
and monitor every aspects.
Support for BC, DR and high availability: Every enterprise should have some type of
disaster recovery plan and it is often unwieldy and expensive. IAAS provides a combined
disaster recovery infrastructure that increases manageability and reduce cost. If disaster
happens employees can access the infrastructure via internet connection from anywhere they
want.
Focus on Business Growth: money,time and energy spent, making technology decisions and
appoint staffs to maintain andmanage the technology frame is essential for growing the
business (Liu et al., 2014). By moving substructure to a service-based model, organizations
can center their resources and time where they desired such asemerginginventions in
applications and solutions.
Section C: Share Point
FEATURES IAAS PAAS SAAS
Basic Description
It is the type of
infrastructure where
users got freedom to
choose and install
their own desired
OS, composition or
software.
This type of
infrastructure
provides hardware,
software, operating
system of user
demand and
respective cost and
platform
accordingly.
It provide pre-
configured package
including pre-
installed software.
Users’ needs only to
pay according to the
service they desired.
Deals With
Storage, Nerwork,
servers, Load
balancers and
Virtual Machines
Web Servers (like
tomcat),
Runtimes( like java
runtimes), Database
(like MySql,
Oracle),
Applications like
Social networking
sites (Facebook).
Email (Yahoo,
Gmail)
Technical
Difficulties
Huge amount of
knowledge and
familiarity required
The setup is basic
but subject
knowledge is
required to operate
User does not need
to concern about
technologies. The
service provide will
handle everything.

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Importance
The basic layer of
computing
Top of IAAS Complete package of
service is provided
by service provider.
Regional garden needs consider some aspects before choosing the particulate
infrastructure that not only access to cloud also appropriate for the SharePoint services as
their estimated 70 employee has SharePoint office suite installed in their office desktop or
laptop. This aspects to be consider as cost benefit ratio, and blah among IAAS, PAAS and
SAAS. For accessing “off the shelf” SharePoint services SAAS is sufficient while PAAS
provides flexibility over develop applications on SharePoint platform to suit the organizations
desire. Broad explanation of this aspects are following:

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Platform as a service: PAAS usages SharePoint in a hosted environment such as office 365
as the users can get their desired configuration and not responsible for managing the system
they utilize.
Security:
Active Directory: SharePoint depends on an application associate with Active Directory to
categorize users and access over the resources. There can be two approach to SharePoint
deployment 1) Directory Synchronization 2) Standalone clients with Active Directory
deployed in the PAAS data center (Sadiku, Musa& Momoh, 2014). Both options is dependent
on the security requirement and PAAS service provider.
Secure Sockets Layer for HTTP:
SSL technology are recommended with SharePoint sites with a PAAS model. Usually
the SharePoint servers substantially located outside of the network margins and traffic must
verve over the internet. A malicious user could observe the traffic and identify important
information such as passwords or files (Shetty et al., 2015). This can place an additional
yearly cost load on the company to preserve dynamic SSL licenses from a third party unless
the PAAS provider offers an SSL solution by default.
Advantage of PAAS
The main advantage of using SharePoint in a PAAS platform is cost efficiency.
Garden Regional Ltd. and its employees will has the options to large amount of functionality
for a low per-user monthly fee. No need of in-housing staff SharePoint in a PAAS
deployment. There is no need of local support staff to deploy the SharePoint services
(Sowmya, Deepika & Naren, 2014). PAAS deployment services are operated by the service
provider. For a local server infrastructure highly paid IT staff and Specialized are needed
while using PAAS this investments are lessen. There is obvious cost saving in using cloud
service deployment. Maintaining patch is essential for desktop and laptop servers. Patches
and updates automatically monitored and managed by other organization that also save cost
in Cooling, Power, Space and hardware procurement. While this is an advantage, it should be
noted that sometimes the expectations of outage windows and maintenance may need to be
realigned for the cloud provider’s service levels.

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Problems that Regional Gardens may encounter
Using platform as a service as infrastructure Regional Garden surely save a lot of cost
investment but there are some certain disadvantage to take into consideration. One of the
aspect is to consider is Multi-tenancy. PAAS is suitable for the Multi-tenancy Customers for
their unique security requirement. Most of the PAAS SharePoint deployment are using multi-
tenant model that means several customer can share the same server resources (Turnbull &
amanta, 2013). This could lead to data lose, open server and bad performance. Following type
of information is crucial for Regional Garden Ltd. and could be compromised by using PAAS
SharePoint services.
 Classified information
 Personally Identifiable Information(PII),
 HIPAA
 Trade or corporate secrets
No Internet Connection, No data: Every staff has their own laptop or desktop to use
SharePoint services that rely on the internet connection. If the internet connection is not
stable and there is an outrage, the staffs will be unable to access the cloud services.
Security concerns may preclude the use of AD FS or directory sync for single sign-on: A
PAAS SharePoint deployment uses the active Directory federation services to implement
solitary Sign-on (Xu,Chang& Zhou, 2013). Users can access SharePoint without entering
credentials multiple times.
Solve the issues
Regional Garden may encounter the issues discussed above. However, this are not
crucial problems can be solved easily through proper managing and monitoring. They
should focus on the security and the data they are sharing with the provider. Proper
encryption is essential and RGL should check on the Server routinely to check the server and
system is working properly. Staffs should avoid sharing crucial document, and trade off
secrets on SharePoint.
Conclusion
It can be concluded from above dissuasion that moving to cloud will not only provide
them automation it will also enable new opportunities. After evaluating every infrastructure

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Platform as a Service is suited the best for Regional Garden Ltd. in every aspects as it is cost
efficient and provides services like multi-tenant facilities.

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