CHOOSING A CLOUD SERVICES PROVIDER: CASE REVIEW
T.R. Scott
INFO 6840
March 26, 2018
The case is about Joe Kwo, the CIO of a company named Fintech, which is a billing and
payment service for the alcoholic beverage industry. Kwo, is trying to decide which cloud
service provider is the best one to use. Kwo talks with his staff and the decision is to choose
between Microsoft, Amazon and Google. All three of the service providers fit what Fintech
requires but they all have key differences. The Fintech case looks at the decisions a company has
to make when trying to purchase cloud services.
Joe Kwo had to decide on the best route that Fintech needed to go as far as what type of
cloud service to use. Fintech had a solid I.T. staff but they needed to find the best provider of
cloud based services. Kwo and his I.T. staff had to come up with the task setting the guidelines
on what requirements they needed to have for the data analysis for the cloud computing. To
accurately make a report of the data analysis, Fintech’s I.T. staff used the data from their
customers who required they have the data in two formats which are a data access tool or by .csv
file format which allowed them format into Microsoft Excel.
Before deciding which cloud services to use, Fintech first had to understand which types of
cloud services were available to use as well as the difference. There are two types of cloud based
services. The first cloud based service is Platform as a Service (PaaS) , the provider would
provide and manage the infrastructure and behind the scene software. The second type of cloud
service is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS providers would own and operate the
server farms but the company I.T. staff had to choose the install and maintain their own
development tools and middleware.
There were many benefits a company could benefit from by going to a cloud service but one of
the main concerns a company faced with using cloud based services was the concern for safe
security of their data on the cloud. Data breaches, credential and broken authentication, account
hijacking, system vulnerabilities, APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) parasite, permanent loss of
data, DoS (denial of service attacks) and cloud service abuse were just some of the security
concerns when dealing with Cloud services.
Fintech wanted to move to the cloud based system so that the company transactions could be
higher which meant increased data volume. Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon were their top
three choices due to their outstanding capabilities in batch computing and cloud-native
applications. Amazon and Microsoft were top leaders in cloud platform. Fintech took careful in
their choice based on the cost and special capabilities that each of the cloud services offered.
Microsoft Azure offered a cheaper application re-development cost. Google offered a cheaper,
more flexible database configuration that was easy to customize and google offered a volume
discount.
Kwo and Fintech were going to need to hire new members onto their I.T. staff that were
experienced in using cloud based services. The company also had to train current I.T. staff
members on the new cloud based system. Fintech had to do research on what Google, Microsoft
Azure and Amazon offered in giving out training to a company’s I.T. staff. Microsoft Azure,
Google and Amazon all provided training and all provided certifications such as Amazon AWS
solution architect and Developer associate, Google Cloud certifications and Microsoft Solutions
Architect.
There were some challenges that Fintech faced when trying to decide on the correct cloud
service to use. The first challenge was the security aspect of the cloud services. A second
challenge was trying to get the correct I.T. staff members hired for the new technology because
Fintech will need a long-term staff that could provide maintenance and support for the cloud
service. A third challenge was deciding on which cloud service offered the best affordable price
in database cost per month.
In regards to Fintech’s strategy in regards to the cloud service there are some
recommendations that I would have suggested they do. The I.T. department should have
planned on running each of the cloud service providers in a development and testing
environment on a longer basis. I would have suggested that the company extend this project out
to a two-year project with a staff that would be first hired on a contract basis only for testing and
researching purposes first. I also think the company should have looked more into possibly
leaning more towards Platform as a service (PaaS) more so than hiring a I.T. staff fulltime for
cloud services.
The operations approach should have been more thoroughly planned. When a company is
considering moving to a new software and have clients that depend on them to secure their
transactions, it’s very important to include your top and most demanding clients in your plans to
move to a new type of technology service. The executives of Fintech as well as a team of top
I.T. staff members should have talked with other top executives and their I.T. staff to get advice
on what would be the right plan on the cloud service direction they should go. Talking to clients
would have given Fintech a broader scope of what they need to do because their clients put their
trust in them on making sure their data is securely transacted when it is processed by Fintech.
Fintech also could look to see what clients were using cloud technology and get advice on how
their client is using it.
When moving to the cloud based services there are tons of factors a company need to
consider. A few factors to consider are existing software licenses and software compatibility,
verify usage, disaster recovery and data location are things that a company needs to consider
when moving to the cloud based service.
First, a company needs to look at making sure the current software they are using is licensed
and is compatible. Companies need to check to make sure that their current license of the
software is capable of being hosted by the cloud service. Software compatibility is also a factor
to consider because some of the software companies use software that many cloud services do
not work well with.
Second, companies need to verify usage to verify that titles, platforms and infrastructure can
be properly run on cloud based services. It should be smart to make sure that a company’s data
can be used on the cloud. Usage should be verified before a company signs any contract with a
cloud services provider.
Third, a company needs to consider the data location and disaster recovery. When a company
is considering going to cloud based services, where they will have the central location for the
data to be is crucial and of vital importance. Making sure a good disaster recovery plan is
implemented is very serious and looking at the potential disasters that could affect the data is
very important. The disaster recover and data location should be planned very seriously because
once data is gone it is gone for good and this could cost companies millions and possibly
billions of dollars in loss.
