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Collaborative Meetings in the Cloud
* One of the biggest cost savers to businesses due to the cloud is the advent of the virtual meeting.
* Using sites such as WebEx and GoToMeeting, businesses can now reduce travel costs through cloud-based meetings.
Real World: GotoMeeting
* Virtual meetings allow companies to reduce expensive travel while maintaining the benefits of face-to-face interaction.
Man in the middle attack
* This attack occurs when a hacker is able to interrupt network messages and essentially place himself between the user and the remote system.
Hypervisor Attack
* Hackers refer to the process of taking over the hypervisor as a hyperjacking attack.
Guest-Hopping Attack
* The Hacker is unable to directly attack operating system A, the hacker may then try to attack another operating system B. Attack from one guest operating system to another as a guest-hopping attack
Thread Disk Failure
* Disk drives are mechanical devices, and as such they will eventually wear out and fail.
* Further, other threats, such as fire, flood, theft, or power surges, can result in the loss of disk-based data.
Understanding MTBF
* All mechanical devices have an associated mean time between failure (MTBF) rating. For a disk drive, the MTBF may be 500,000 hours of use (about 8 years).
* It is important that you understand how manufacturers calculate the MTBF.
* To start, the manufacturer may begin running 1000 disk drives. When the first disk drive fails, the manufacturer will note the time—let’s say after 500 hours (less than a month).
Understanding MTBF Continued
* The manufacturers then multiply that time by the number of devices that they tested to determine the MTBF:
MTBF = (500) × (1000)
= 500,000 hours
* It’s important to note that no device in the group ran near the 500,000 hours!
Reducing Disk Failure Threat
* The first and foremost risk mitigation for disk failure is to have up-to-date disk backups.
* If a disk fails, the company can simply replace the disk and restore the backup.
* That implies, of course, that the cause of the disk failure (fire, smoke, flood, or theft) did not also damage the disk backup.
* To reduce such risk, most companies store their disk backups at an off-site storage facility.
Power Threats
* Computers are sensitive electronic devices. When a computer loses power, the user’s current unsaved data is lost.
* Further, an electrical spike can permanently damage the computer’s electronic components, rendering the device unusable or destroying disk-based data.
* Although power blackouts can be caused by storms, accidents, or acts of terrorism, the more common power brownout is typically more damaging.
Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
* Users plug devices into surge suppressors to protect the devices from power spikes.
* A UPS provides users with a few minutes of battery backup power so the users can save their work and shut down their systems in an orderly way.
Cloud-Based Fire Suppression
* If you house your data center in the cloud, your system will reside in a state-of-the-art data center that provides fire suppression systems and, in most cases, colocated system redundancy.
* Again, because the PaaS and IaaS solution providers share their costs across many customers, they are able to provide their customers with top-level service at a relatively low cost.
Database System Failure
* Most companies today rely on database management systems to store a wide range of data, from customer data, to human resources data, to application specific data.
*If a company’s database fails, many applications may
also fail.
Reducing Risk of Database Failure
* Database replication creates two live copies of databases on separate servers. If one database fails, the other can immediately take over operations.
Strange Loop site Optimization
Use a Strangeloop site to evaluate a site of your choice.
There are different site performance monitoring tools you can use to measure a site’s responsiveness.
Issue: Making slow pages to load faster.
This requires company to take steps such as eliminating or compressing graphics, compressing text and improving cache utilization.
However research shows that such delays cause the customers to log off websites .
Strangeloop provides a site- optimizing solution that companies can deploy to improve their site performance.
Economies of Scale
There are 3 system administrators who oversee 100 servers. Each administrator is paid $50,000. Evaluate Economies of Scale.
Economies of Scale : Cost per server for system administration
Administrative costs = $50,000 + 50,000+ 50,000 = $150,000
Administrative cost per server = $150,000/ 100 = $1500
Profit Margins
* Profit Margin = (Income / Revenue) *100
Expenses are
Non-IT related expenses : $300,000
IT data center expenses : $150,000
Power expenses : $ 50,000
* Income = Revenue – Expenses
[ Revenue = $600,00]
Return on INVESTMENT (ROI)
Return on Investment (ROI) = Income (or savings) / Cost
= 20,000 / 50,000
=0.40 or 40 percent.
Higher the ROI the better. In this way company can compare two or more investment opportunities.
Three areas
- Cloud also allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centers that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three areas:
- · Supply-side savings. Large-scale data centers (DCs) lower costs per server.
- · Demand-side aggregation. Aggregating demand for computing smooths overall variability, allowing server utilization rates to increase
- · Multi-tenancy efficiency. When changing to a multitenant application model, increasing the number of tenants (i.e., customers or users) lowers the application management and server cost per tenant.
Duo Push Authentication
- For the fastest and most secure login, use Duo’s mobile app to send push notifications to your phone as your second factor. Here’s how it works:
- Enter your username and password into your login page.
- Choose ‘Duo Push’ as your second factor on the next screen prompt.
- Then, tap ‘Approve’ on the push notification sent to your phone.
- Duo Push is an out-of-band authentication method that prevents remote attackers from stealing your password and your second factor.
https://duo.com/solutions/features/user-experience/easy-authentication