Cs 54100 : United Cloud Assessment Answers

You are required to conduct research on how you will implement the web database, described in Assignment 1 (Modelling) business case,in a cloud instance.

Your research should be based on recent developments in the field of database technology.

Your response should address not only the implementation considerations but also the security issues.

Implementing the cloud server database

Cloud databases are moving I into fashion with the advent of time and technology. Almost every business that have their online existence have switched over to their respective cloud platforms to preserve their organizational or business information. In this case, The XYZ United Training Centre database is also recommended to be established on the cloud. This will not only allow the easy and massive storage of data but will also assist the organization to maintain a scalable form of database, which will be extremely fruitful for their business. Some of the cloud server implementation techniques, advantages and security factors will be discussed in the sections below.

Relational Database model in Cloud

The relational database structure that was designed for the purpose of sufficing to the needs of the web application of XYZ United training centre database. Relational database works with tables that hold various data about the entities within a database system. The collection of many such tables with meaningful relationship between them forms a database. The cloud servers are mostly used in the modern days with an aim to preserve NoSQL or non-relational database models, however, there are several renowned cloud database service providers who also allow the use or renting of relational SQL database services on their cloud instances (Bear, Lamb & Tran, 2012). Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google offer the best of cloud hosting services with database. Hosting a SQL relational database on the cloud is a familiar approach and it provides a popular format for the purpose of data analytics. Moreover, it also accelerates the business participles by leveraging the cloud to lower the cost and also enhance scalability, speed and data retrieval accuracy. Clouds not only provide database storage services, but they also provide business organizations with DaaS or Database-as-a-Service, through which they offer database servicing facilities. In this way, XYZ can rely on the Third party cloud service providers to manage the administrator end tasks of their web platform. They also allow other utilities like back-up and maintenance services.

Technological advancements in cloud server databases

Cloud computing has evolved through the ages. Database management system has been implemented into cloud computing technologies, long time back, and since then every effort has been made to gradually enhance the storage and retrieval abilities of cloud database systems. Database services have come up as Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS, within the cloud delivery model (Gelogo & Lee, 2012). Certain cloud platforms like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure also allows the bridging of SQL and NoSQL databases (Roijackers & Fletcher, 2012). This makes it easier for the data to be stored and migrated at any point of time, without having to be concerned about integrity issues.

Security Issues

Cloud computing has been criticized for its security flaws all throughout the ages. Researchers and clients have raised multiple ethical and other security related questions based on cloud services. Some of the most discussed cloud implementation security issues are as follows:

1. Third Party handling: In cloud implementation, data needs to be levied over to the control of the third party service provider. The organization must research thoroughly enough before hiring the cloud services from a third party organization otherwise data ownership rights are often violated in such cases. Unprofessional and notorious third party service providers may leak organizational data that has been hosted on their cloud platform.
2. Hacks and data breaches: Cyber criminals are infamously known for breaking into the cloud servers that are weakly protected and they steal or leak sensitive information. This is a serious issue that cloud computing has been facing right from its inception. They can also breach into software systems that have been hosted on cloud servers using the stolen data. Through this, they can login into user accounts and make unapproved changes in their profile (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012).
3. Middleware muddles: Planting middleware is the technology of breaking into a distributed and taking control of the whole. This involves the unauthorized access or modification of data on a large scale. This may not only be cemented to one particular organization but may intern harm all organization who have their data uploaded on the particular cloud server that has been breached.

References

Bear, C., Lamb, A., & Tran, N. (2012, September). The vertica database: SQL RDBMS for managing big data. In Proceedings of the 2012 workshop on Management of big data systems (pp. 37-38). ACM.

Gelogo, Y. E., & Lee, S. (2012). Database management system as a cloud service. International Journal of Future Generation Communication and Networking, 5(2), 71-76.

Roijackers, J., & Fletcher, G. (2012). Bridging sql and nosql. Master's thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology.

Zissis, D., & Lekkas, D. (2012). Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation computer systems, 28(3), 583-592.