Reference no: EM133574227

Assignment

Case Study: eMoney

A hybrid cloud model is the preferred model for organizations looking to modernize their environment, offering all the advantages of an on-premises cloud, with the ability to meet regulatory and compliance issues, combined with the cost-effectiveness and scalability/flexibility of the public cloud.

Such was the case with eMoney. It has hundreds of locations across the U.S. and Canada and provides consumers with financial assistance, ranging from check cashing to loans and money transfers.

Decision makers recognised that it was no longer feasible to solely serve customers through brick-and-mortar locations. They invested in cloud services to expand their infrastructure and increase the company's marketplace relevance.

"You can't be a consumer finance leader with brick-and-mortar only. Not in today's day and age," says Manny Laver, CIO, eMoney.

"So, we're pivoting to an omnichannel model that provides services wherever and whenever consumers need them."

Company leaders knew they wanted to build new digital channels and engage with clients across more touchpoints. That meant moving to the cloud using SaaS.

"Putting everything in the cloud was a learning experience," says Lot Samani, CTO, eMoney.

"We learned some applications, like our core transaction platform, should remain on-premises in a private cloud but with tie-ins to the public cloud.

"We also learned cloud-based storage is very expensive, and we have a lot of data. So it became clear that a hybrid cloud model would be the key."

Laver says the cloud transition helped the company operate more cost-effectively and consolidate 32 equipment racks down to four. As a result, the company estimates they will save over $3.5 million over the next three years.

For example, they need servers for three functions:

1) Store business email securely,
2) Run a customer-facing application, and
3) Run internal business applications.

Each of these functions has different configuration requirements:

1) The email application requires more storage capacity and a Windows operating system.
2) The customer-facing application requires a Linux operating system and high processing power to handle large volumes of website traffic.
3) The internal business application requires iOS and more internal memory (RAM).

To meet these requirements, the company sets up three different dedicated physical servers for each application. The company must make a high initial investment and perform ongoing maintenance and upgrades for one machine at a time. The company also cannot optimize its computing capacity. It pays 100% of the servers' maintenance costs but uses only a fraction of their storage and processing capacities.

With virtualization, the company creates three digital servers, or virtual machines, on a single physical server. It specifies the operating system requirements for the virtual machines and can use them like the physical servers. However, the company now has less hardware and fewer related expenses.

The cloud investments have collectively helped the company engage customers in new ways and keep its business model moving forward.

"We're becoming more touchless and frictionless as a company, and our IT has to match," Laver says. "The cloud technologies we've implemented are helping us be faster, more agile, and increasingly consumer focused."

Industry: Financial services

Use Case: Reinventing its long-established business model will allow eMoney to better serve customers and maintain a competitive advantage.

Outcome: The company created a hybrid cloud model to build a simplified and fully integrated technology stack, allowing the company to give its customers an omnichannel experience while improving its IT management.

Task

Question I. Compare and contrast the three main types of cloud architecture, namely: public, private and hybrid cloud. In your discussion, explain the management mechanisms and delivery modes of the services. For example, in a hybrid cloud environment, companies have the advantage of being able to keep sensitive data that must be stored in-house while also optimising the use of public cloud storage for everything else. This can significantly reduce costs as well as time spent on in-house private cloud management. Additionally, in a hybrid cloud model, enterprises deploy workloads in private IT environments or public clouds -- including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS -- and can often move workloads and data between them as computing needs and costs change. This gives a business greater flexibility and more data deployment options.

Question II. Describe the term virtualization and appraise how it helped the company financially and improves server management.

Question III. The case study mentioned some of the issues involving cloud computing deployments, such as regulatory and compliance issues, cost-effectiveness, and scalability/flexibility of the cloud solution. Identify at least 5 more issues and challenges of cloud computing and briefly discuss each.

Question IV. Summarize how the company implemented a SaaS and IaaS solution to solve their specific business objectives. You need to clearly explain how the cloud solutions are aligned with their business needs.