Cloud Hosting Vendor Report

A Sample Answer For the Assignment: Cloud Hosting Vendor Report

Title: Cloud Hosting Vendor Report

Cloud computing is the process by which a firm procures resources meant to be used in storage services. As such cloud hosting primarily pertains to the application of virtual network, hardware, composite solutions, and data hosting services. Even though the services are often rendered by cloud computing providers, there are other instances in which the same services are provided by facilities that are renown for hosting data, and related solutions (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2017). By so doing, cloud hosting serves as a cloud delivery model by being an infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The aforementioned is the platform and a suite through which virtual or in other terms remove service can be rendered to clients. The virtual services are provided on an on-demand basis and therefore have to be hosted on top of the infrastructure meant for cloud computation services.

Cloud hosting is facilitated by virtualization. The latter refers to the setting in which a data center or infrastructure in tandem with its

entire computing capacity is delivered and distributed to multiple users simultaneously. On the other end, the users are meant to use the underlying infrastructure that has been distributed to them to host services, data and applications that belong to them or those to which they own rights. A case in point is that involving the virtualization and consolidation of a physical server (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2017). When the aforementioned happens, several cloud servers get hosted which means that all of them would be sharing the same memory, storage, network and even a processor. In such circumstances, cloud hosting would be scaling hosted resources through the provision of untapped flexibility. The key cloud hosting firms and the key performance indicators that will be discussed in the paper are Google and Microsoft considering their reputation in as far as cloud hosting is concerned and how they have managed to grow over the years and attract more clients with each passing day.

Key Performance Indicators

Goals

Microsoft applies the smart goals concept in as far as its key performance indicators are concerned. Foremost, the firm is quite specific about what it wants in pertinence to the provision of services to its clients. Secondly, the company uses metrics that are quite measurable in the providing of cloud hosting services to clients. In so doing, Microsoft has an easy time tracking the manner in which their projects are performing and at the same time monitor the performance of services hosted by the customers on the platform distributed to them. Thirdly, the company sets goals that are not only attainable but also quite realistic thus ascertaining that the employees of the firm are working towards achievable milestones. Fourth, Microsoft majors on the relevance of the metrics they are supposed to handle and determine if they are pertinent to their projects. Lastly, the firm within specific time-frames which works to ensure they have baselines and milestones. Having working intervals plays a pivotal role in helping the firm identify migrations, seasonality, and product leases.

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Google, on the other hand, does not have or rather follow the smart goals concept. Therefore, in order for the firm to stay afloat despite the stiff competition in the market pertaining to cloud hosting, Google strives to ensure it leverages the changes that are witnessed in the cloud hosting industry to ascertain the profitability of the business. As such, Google, through its managerial team measures and ascertains the success of the business in terms of an ongoing basis. By so doing, the company has to keep track of the day-to-day activities undertaken by their clients to stay ahead of the changes they desire and the various ways through which to enact them. However, Google can only keep track of the activities done by their clients through “page tracking”. The latter is the means by which the individual pages of a website get checked in terms of how they perform. The time on a page is used to display the duration that a customer took on a given page, in turn, the information obtained is used in performance measurement.

Workload Type Allocation

The bounce rate which is one of the major workload type allocations is a case in point in which the concept regarding “page tracking” is used. The bounce rate is applied when the need to determine the quality of traffic associated with a given page or URL. In addition, the bounce rate indicates the level of satisfaction obtained by clients in pertinence to meeting their needs (Business Information Systems, 2015). The bounce rate gives not only the average time spent on a website but also the five recent landing pages that were associated with the highest time duration. The overview plays a pivotal role in helping Google, who in this case apply the idea in their cloud hosting, to identify the website content they find most interesting and in the quickest way possible.

Microsoft, on the other hand, uses website traffic metrics to measure the success of the websites that have been hosted by their clients. However, for the process to be successful, Microsoft has to ascertain not only the critical functionality of the key factors on the website but also the constraints that may not be working as they were meant. Microsoft measures website traffic metrics on either a yearly or monthly basis. The changes recorded by the firm over the given time frame are classified as either positive or negative considering the effect they have on traffic.

Revenue Efficiencies

Both Microsoft and Google gauge their revenue growth rate in terms of the average revenue per user (ARPU). The firms compare and determine their revenue growth rates for the current total revenue for a given period with that of the previous year’s. Other than merely generalizing the revenue from the clients, the two firms take a keen interest in the things that are of value to their clients by determining the average revenue each client generates. Say, if a client generated the highest revenue, the company would track the way in which they use the platform provided to them to know how to improve cloud hosting services and maximize their profit margins (Business Information Systems, 2015). However, Microsoft calculates the percentage of revenue that is generated from the sources that prove to be recurring. By so doing, Microsoft increases its gross margin. The focal point on which the calculation of the percentage of revenues is based is the idea of the existence of varying revenue streams. Often, the highest sources that have been proven to be profit-generating are managed services.

Workload Versus Utilization

While Microsoft majors its key performance indicators on the workload it handles for the clients, Google focuses on utilization by ensuring the generated traffic is of the highest quality it can obtain to the clients. Google uses the bounce rate and the average session duration to compare the quality of the generated traffic. The quality of traffic would be determined to be of high quality if at all it has a high average session duration and low bounce rate. On the same note, the high traffic would mean that the service rendered has a high-quality conversion probability (Patel, Ranabahu & Sheth, 2009). The rate of customer acquisition determines the workload for Microsoft.

While Microsoft uses the workload concept to get a hold of large projects, Google is busy developing long-term relationships with the clients. The reason is mainly based on the dire fact that workload serves to ensure that Microsoft covers a wide range of clients by distribution cloud hosting services to them (Business Information Systems, 2015). Utilization, on the other hand, plays a crucial role in ascertaining that the firm, say Google, retains the existing clients by providing all the services they require and in more than one instant. Utilization is always associated with satisfaction considering there is the factoring in of both completion of a task at hand and attaining good client feedback.

Recommendation

Even though both Microsoft and Google serve as the key cloud computing vendors, they have major differences. The variation is mainly due to the competition in the market and every firm is trying to stay ahead of the other through the provision of not only admirable but also quality services to clients. Cloud computing is mainly based on the provision of both pay-as-you-go and cheap computing resources. However, even though the provided services may be deemed as cheap, they ought to be provided in a fashion that would ensure the client attains the value for the money they have spent in order to procure the services of the given firm. As such, the provision of both quality and satisfactory services matter.

Since cloud computing serves with the aim of replacing the traditionally used information technology (IT), the cloud computing vendor that is to be chosen should be one that provides services that are quite distinctive and surpass the traditional measures. Therefore, the best choice, in this case, is Google. The latter mainly focuses on the utilization of resources in order to provide quality services to clients. In so doing, the firm is not only minimizing its operational costs but also being quite keen when rendering services to clients. Now, the keyword in the aforementioned text is “keen”. When a cloud service vendor pays attention to detail when servicing clients, then chances are that the level of satisfaction would be quite high and there would be minimal cases of the clients getting undeserving or underrated services. In addition, Google’s “page tracking” through the bounce rate which is a workload type allocation concept, gives the firm a competitive advantage over the competitors. As opposed to the website tracking metrics used by Microsoft, Google’s bounce rate has the crucial role of keeping tabs on the clients and helping improve their needs by basing the services rendered to them on their desires. Therefore, the cloud service vendor to use in as far as the above analysis is concerned is Google as it proves to be way better than Microsoft.

Cloud Hosting Vendor Report References

Business Information Systems. (2015). The Saylor Foundation. Retrieved from; http://www.saylor.org/book.

Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing. Retrieved from; https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/78

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2017). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.

When selecting a cloud hosting vendor, the Service Level Agreement must be considered. Find at least two cloud hosting vendors. Google and Microsoft are cloud hosting vendors – also Rackspace and others. Prepare a comparative analysis of the two cloud service vendors. What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) needed in the cloud vendor? Use the references and other online sources to support your analysis.

Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing. http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/78 This Report is brought to you for free and open access by the The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Kno.e.sis Publications by an authorized administrator of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected].

Building Return on Investment from Cloud Computing â€“ Cloud Computing Key Performance Metrics
http://www.opengroup.org/cloud/wp_cloud_roi/p5.htm

Assignment Expectations

Prepare a report comparing two cloud hosting vendors. Compare their service level agreements in terms of the Key Performance Indicators. Complete the analysis with a recommendation for the vendor to use based on the analysis in the report.
Chapters 2, 3, and 10 in:
Business Information Systems. (2015). The Saylor Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.saylor.org/books

Califf, C. B., Sarker, S., Sarker, S., & Skilton, M. (2016). The role and value of a cloud service partner. MIS Quarterly Executive, 15(3), 231-242. Available in the Trident Online Library.

Lacity, M. C., & Reynolds, P. (2014). Cloud services practices for small and medium-sized enterprises. MIS Quarterly Executive,13(1), 31-44. Available in the Trident Online Library.

Suri, S. (2016). Computing with the crowd. Communications of the ACM, 59(6), 101-101. Available in the Trident Online Library.

Stamas, P. J., Kaarst-Brown, M. L., & Bernard, S. A. (2014). The business transformation payoffs of cloud services at Mohawk. MIS Quarterly Executive, 13(4), 177-192. Available in the Trident Online Library.

Read Chapter 8, Utilizing Data for Efficiency and Effectiveness in:
Watson, R. T. (2007). Information Systems. Global Text Project.

Edwards, J. (2015). Ugly duckling or black swan? Teradata Magazine Q2, 1-5. Retrieved from http://assets.teradata.com/resourceCenter/downloads/TeradataMagazineArticles/AR7082-ugly-duckling-or-black-swan.pdf?processed=1

Lawson-Dawson, S. (2016). Slay the VUCA dragon. Retrieved from Teradata at http://bigdata.teradata.com/US/Articles-News/Slay-The-VUCA-Dragon/

Schramm, C. (2015). Analytics is the ticket to better service and value for Siemens. Teradata Magazine Q2, 1-2. Retrieved from http://assets.teradata.com/resourceCenter/downloads/TeradataMagazineArticles/AR7087-analytics-is-the-ticket-to-better-service-and-value-for-siemens.pdf?processed=1

Module 2, Lecture 1: Information Management in the 2010s

Module 2, Lecture 2: IT Infrastructure

Building Return on Investment from Cloud Computing â€“ Cloud Computing Key Performance Metrics
http://www.opengroup.org/cloud/wp_cloud_roi/p5.htm

Introduction to Excel Formulas
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