Integrated Approach of Office Automation
Regional Garden’s first undertaking is to provide an office automation system for their staffs so that the staffs of the organization are able to access the different services such as email, word processing, spreadsheet capabilities and the online storage of files. However, the organization is very concerned about the different critical issues associated with this change. The two approaches of office automation services that are recommended for Regional Gardens are integrated approach of office automation and use of cloud in office automation. In order to understand which approach will be appropriate for Regional gardens, it is essential to evaluate the functionalities, advantages and disadvantages of both the approach. The two different approaches of office automation are elaborated in the following section.
In this approach a configured network of computer hardware and software is used in order to store and access the data. The design and implementation of an integrated office automation system indicates that the organization will take in charge of automating the different processes running within an organization. This should be linear with all the elements including users, equipments and different services running within the organization. An automated system can be implemented inside the premises of Regional Gardens where data will be stored within the organization’s hardware. One of the major disadvantages of using an integrated system is that, the data will have to be managed by the organization and a lot of physical space is needed to store the organization’s data within the premise. The existing infrastructure of the organization can support an integrated approach.
Another suggested method of implementing office automation system in Regional Gardens is use of cloud in data storage. The storage of data in the cloud will not only provide the much needed security but will also enhance the data accessibility. The employees of Regional Gardens can access the data stored over cloud with the help of web browser (Xu, 2012). The cloud automation approach will be integrating all the processes and functions running within an organization. One of the major advantages of cloud approach is that it can be customized according to the requirements of the organization. Having an uninterrupted internet connection is a necessary need for this approach.
There are certain advantages of cloud approach of office automation in comparison to the integrated approach. One of which is the storage of data in the cloud server. Moving to the cloud will enhance the different function of office automation. Since the accessibility of the data will be enhanced by this approach, it is recommended for Regional Gardens to make use of Cloud computing for office automation.
Cloud Approach of Office Automation
The differences between IaaS and PaaS approaches in public cloud are as follows (Obrutsky, 2016)-
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IaaS platform of cloud computing |
IaaS or infrastructure as a service is a provider of virtualized computing resources over internet. |
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IaaS provides an instant computing architecture that can be managed over internet. The infrastructure will be provided by the cloud provider. |
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It generally deals with a self service model that is used for accessing and managing the data stored over a remote data centre. |
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If infrastructure space is unavailable, this type of cloud computing approach is used. |
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It reduces the infrastructure cost, that will provide a virtually limitless scalability and agility |
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It helps in reducing the costing of IT staffs and it is mainly subscription based. |
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The IaaS service providers include Azure, Amazon and so on. |
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PaaS platform of cloud computing |
PaaS provides an on demand self service and resource pooling |
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PaaS is a platform as a service providing the platform for the users to develop run and manage their application. |
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It is a third party service provider that delivers different hardware and software tools that are needed for storing and accessing a data. |
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It allows multiple users to access the system. |
The differences between the IaaS and PaaS approach is elaborated in the above table. Apart from this, cost of implementation is a major difference between these two approaches. The IaaS is more costly to implement as it provides the whole cloud infrastructure to the client. On the other hand, the PaaS approach provides a platform for implementing the cloud services in an organization. IaaS is generally more secure in comparison to PaaS (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012). However, since Regional Gardens is planning to implement it in a public cloud platform, security will be a major issue.
The differences between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are as follows (Jadeja & Modi, 2012,)-
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Characteristics |
PaaS |
IaaS |
SaaS |
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Definition |
PaaS or platform as a service provides a platform to the client is building a cloud application over internet. However, it does not provide the cloud infrastructure |
IaaS or infrastructure as a service is very much different from PaaS as it provides an option of virtualized computing resources over the internet (Manvi & Shyam, 2014). It provides a cloud infrastructure as well |
SaaS or software as a service can be defined as a distribution model where a third party service provides hosts an application over internet and makes it available for the general public. |
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Characteristics |
Implementation time of PaaS is much less and provides on demand services |
Implementation time of IaaS is lengthy and costly in comparison to PaaS |
Implementation time is less than both IaaS and PaaS |
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Advantages of the approach |
PaaS is a cost effective solution and can be deployed in a very less time. Furthermore, the PaaS service is scalable and easily customizable |
Although the cost of implementation of IaaS is comparatively higher than PaaS, it provides a much more secure connection in comparison to PaaS or SaaS (Moreno-Vozmediano, Montero & Llorente, I2012) |
SaaS has the lowest upfront cost and can be easily deployed. In SaaS the complexity of the IT infrastructure and the associated upaadates are taken care of by the client and so it is easily deployable architecture. |
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Disadvantages |
One of the Major disadvantages of PaaS approach is that it is not much secure as it provides a shared platform (Chen & Zhao, 2012). |
In IaaS, the customer is responsible for VM Management and is one of the expensive cloud approach |
SaaS although is easily deployable, the client has no control over the data of the customer stored over cloud (Aghera, Chaudhary & Kumar, 2012). Furthermore, the cloud vendor might be able to access the customers’ data. |
Considering the advantages and disadvantages of the different cloud approaches it iws recommended for the Regional Gardens to implement a PaaS solution. This approach is recommended as it will not only provide a cost effective solution for the organization, but also will help the organization in making use of their obsolete infrastructure. IaaS could have been implemented as well since it provides a much more secure solution but is not considered in this case as the infrastructure of Regional Gardens has an existing data center as well. Furthermore, since public cloud platform will be used, it is much secure to use the own infrastructure of the organization.
The PaaS model is more appropriate for the Share Point service as the PaaS will only provide the platform for integrating all the business operation of the organization in cloud.
However, there are certain problems associated with PaaS, which are as follows-
- Higher downtime for technical difficulties
- Loss of control of data
- Less data security (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016).
References
Aghera, P., Chaudhary, S., & Kumar, V. (2012, May). An approach to build multi-tenant SaaS application with monitoring and SLA. In Communication systems and network technologies (csnt), 2012 international conference on (pp. 658-661). IEEE.
Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.
Chen, D., & Zhao, H. (2012, March). 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.
Jadeja, Y., & Modi, K. (2012, March). Cloud computing-concepts, architecture and challenges. In Computing, Electronics and Electrical Technologies (ICCEET), 2012 International Conference on (pp. 877-880). IEEE.
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.
Moreno-Vozmediano, R., Montero, R. S., & Llorente, I. M. (2012). Iaas cloud architecture: From virtualized datacenters to federated cloud infrastructures. Computer, 45(12), 65-72.
Obrutsky, S. (2016). Cloud Storage: Advantages, Disadvantages and Enterprise Solutions for Business.
Paraiso, F., Haderer, N., Merle, P., Rouvoy, R., & Seinturier, L. (2012, June). A federated multi-cloud PaaS infrastructure. In Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2012 IEEE 5th International Conference on (pp. 392-399). IEEE.
Xu, X. (2012). From cloud computing to cloud manufacturing. Robotics and computer-integrated manufacturing, 28(1), 75-86.
Zissis, D., & Lekkas, D. (2012). Addressing cloud computing security issues. Future Generation computer systems, 28(3), 583-592.
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