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Cloud Computing
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What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services—including storage, processing power, databases, and software—over the internet rather than through local hardware. Students write about it across disciplines such as information technology, business management, computer science, and cybersecurity, reflecting how broadly the technology has reshaped organizational infrastructure. Its academic interest lies in the tension between its practical benefits—scalability, cost reduction, and accessibility—and the significant technical and governance challenges it introduces, particularly around data security and service reliability.

The papers archived on this topic take a range of approaches. Some examine cloud computing historically, tracing its conceptual roots back to mainframe models and following its evolution into modern service architectures. Others focus on specific service providers, comparing business strategies and infrastructure offerings. A strong subset addresses security concerns directly, including insider threats and distributed denial-of-service attacks, while additional papers approach the subject from a management or enterprise strategy angle, analyzing how organizations adopt and govern cloud systems. Literature review and user-satisfaction frameworks also appear, indicating that both technical and behavioral research methods are common.

A strong essay on cloud computing succeeds by committing to a focused thesis rather than surveying the topic broadly. If the paper addresses security, it should specify a threat category—such as data breaches or insider access—and engage with concrete technical or policy-based solutions. Evidence drawn from organizational case studies, service models, or documented attack patterns carries more weight than general claims about industry trends. The most common pitfall is treating cloud computing as uniformly beneficial or uniformly risky; a credible argument acknowledges trade-offs and grounds them in specific contexts.

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Essay Doctorate
Amazon's enterprise infrastructure and analytics as competitive advantage
Amazon's remarkable ascent as one of the top online global retailers can be attributed to the foresight they had in creating a comprehensive distributed order management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and e-commerce series of systems. The many other e-commerce sites that rose quickly with massive infusions of venture capital just as quick exited the market, flaming out due to a lack of system and process scalability, lack of understanding of customer dynamics, and a complete loss of focus on scalable business models. All of these factors are what caused competitors to Amazon to exit the e-commerce market either through acquisition, merger or complete exist from the market. When starting Amazon, Jeff Bezos invested heavily in the distributed order management, ERP, SCM and e-commerce integration points to book distributors initially, and then expanded into a broader product mix. This allowed the enterprise to quickly scale as volumes increased during the first five years of the company's existence. Having creating this reliable, scalable and secure platform, Mr. Bezos and the Amazon founders concentrated on creating an analytics layer throughout their architecture that could quantify customer, distributor, dealer and even competitor activity on the site (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). This reliance on analytics also gave Amazon executives and technical staff the insight they needed to launch quickly into entirely new product categories, get the complex and often confusing task of localization right, and also create a highly popular and profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform and hosting platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (Mitchell, 2012). From a technology standpoint the performance of Amazon today can be directly attributed to the insightful decisions made in 1994 and 1995 when the company founders prioritized the development of enterprise-wide platforms and a strong focus on analytics over spending all their time on the front-end website and its façade (Lindic, Bavdaz, Kovacic, 2012). As Jeff Bezos would later remark in interviews, by investing to create a truly world-class enterprise back-end system first, his company was freed up to fast track the actual user interface of the e-commerce sites globally at a pace that left comp[editors far behind in terms of functionality and product breadth (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Mr. Bezos chose in 2007 to also institute a culture of metrics that also capitalized on the nearly two decades of investment in their infrastructure (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). Combining the global e-commerce, enterprise-tested infrastructure and the most robust set of analytics that any e-commerce provider had, Amazon was ready to begin expanding their product strategies, start offering greater options in their Amazon Web Services initiative which today is expected to be a $1B by 2015, even by conservative forecasts (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012) and also invest heavily in their state-of-the-art recommendation engine technology that seeks out products and services customers may be interested in and present them during shop[ping sessions in real-time (Sun, 2012). It's important to appreciate just how vast of an e-commerce infrastructure Amazon has in completing this analysis of their e-strategy. They have greater agility, flexibility and capability to execute than any other online retailer globally today. How they choose to use these technologies to attract new customers and keep existing ones loyal, a point the case study makes in greater detail, is predicated on the ability to get the most value from this infrastructure while still staying focused on delivering a world-class customer experience in each transaction. Based on the analysis undertaken for this case analysis, it is abundantly clear that Jeff Bezos and the executive management team are passionate about keeping the company as customer-focused as possible, including the continual selective use of technology to accentuate and strengthen the user experience online and off (Murphy, Narkiewicz, 2010). With these foundational aspects of Amazon defined, the seven areas of focus in this analysis are next presented. The overarching objective of this analysis is to understand the value of e-strategies in organizations, with Amazon being the organization of interest in the analysis. Specifically concentrating on the benefits of having an e-strategy at Amazon, defining how e-strategies contribute to Amazon's broader accomplishments, and an analysis of how Amazon aligns their e-strategy to the overarching organizational strategy as well., The analysis continues with an analysis of the key business factors that are the catalysts of the e-strategy at Amazon, followed by a suggested strategic plan for ensuring e-strategy initiatives at the company continue to lead to profitable growth. The final section of this analysis provides an assessment of the technical infrastructure needed to accomplish the proposed strategic plan. As Amazon has continually evolved its position as a global force in online retailing, its command of supply chains globally has also evolved very quickly. In the latest rankings of the highest-performing supply chains completed by Gartner, a leading research consultancy, Amazon has ranking within the top twenty five for five years running (Amazon Investor Relations, 2012). What this signals is that Amazon has progressed from relying on enterprise-wide infrastructure to compete and is now on the growth trajectory of making supply chain processes their competitive advantage.
Paper Undergraduate
Applying research worldviews to cloud computing security risks
In this paper, we answer the following question:How are the worldviews post-positivism, constructivism, advocacy/participatory, and pragmatism (Table 1.1) described in the Creswell book might apply to the following proposed research questions (that part of the Creswell book will be sent as a resource for this work). Every new technology has its own benefits, but on the other hands there are always risks too. There are several risks that are associated with cloud computing, and some of these risks do not have an industry wide solution yet. To accomplish this purpose, the following research questions will be examined: 1. What specific risks do companies face from insider threats in cloud computing situations? This basic question was selected because it is a fundamental piece of knowledge that must be obtained before the research problem can be more adequately and specifically addressed. Identifying risks is necessary for developing a reliable framework and for making recommendations for combating those risks. This will add to current literature in the field by providing more concretely defined and validated risks than are currently available. A variety of malicious and accidental risks are expected to be strongly represented in the findings. How can costs be effectively associated with risks? This question is important for both research purposes, as well, providing another fundamental piece of the framework needed to fulfill the first research purpose and also ensuring that recommendations made in the fulfillment of the second research purpose are cost-effective and proportional. Answering this research question will thus enable the research problem to be directly addressed which it is in fact a part of directly addressing this problem and will further add to the literature in the area by providing a list of mechanisms, associations, and modeled reactions that assign monetary figures to risks. This understanding will greatly enhance other research in the area as well as providing significant practical benefit to current businesses. It is expected that costs will all have multiple factors affecting their values for individual business and scenarios.
Paper Undergraduate
Cloud computing and mobile technologies as drivers of enterprise innovation
Enabling innovation through the use of technology continues to be a major priority for many enterprises globally as the pace of new product development continues to accelerate and industries become more turbulent.
Paper Undergraduate
Evaluating Plunar, Inc. and USuggest, LLC as venture opportunities
This paper required reading over ten new venture executive summaries in order to determine which two of the ten would be the best to invest in. Each executive summary gave a brief introduction to the new business startup, the financial cost for the investors, the marketing plan, the financial summary over a five year period as well as other information. The object was to choose the best new venture to invest in as well as a runner up.
Thesis Undergraduate
Strategic planning for Cincom Systems' SaaS migration
Creating transformational change in companies by automating their most challenging processes, strategies and systems is what Cincom Systems excels at today. The company has five different product divisions, each selling enterprise software into various segments of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketplace. Privately held with 700 employees employed across five continents, Cincom is also profitable and has had many customers on maintenance contracts for over two decades. The future of Cincom is predicated on how well strategic plans can be defined and executed with its major partners including IBM, Microsoft and SAP. Of these three, Microsoft offers the greatest potential for accelerating the product development plans of the Cincom Manufacturing Business Solution (CMBS) business unit. CMBS generates between $7M to $10M a year in revenue, both on maintenance contracts in addition to new software sales, and has created a line of CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that are designed for complex manufacturers. In order to stay competitive, Cincom must move these systems to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, which is how they can be migrated quickly and easily to Cloud computing platforms Microsoft has including the well-known Azure platform. This migration from being purely a licensed application to being on the SaaS platform also needs to include greater support for analytics and business intelligence (BI) within the applications as well. With these new features, the CMBS enterprise suite would be able to generate 30 – 40% more sales. In addition, the costs of supporting customers would drastically be reduced as the SaaS platform would make it possible to streamline new product releases on a central application platform. At present Cincom CMBS struggles with getting its enterprise customers to upgrade their existing CRM and ERP systems as well. With a SaaS-based system the company could roll out entire versions without having to deal with timing and costly delay issues as customers procrastinate on releases. This approach will help to alleviate one of the greatest hidden costs of enterprise software development, having to support multiple versions of legacy applications (Lindley, Topping, Lindley, 2008). It is anticipated this strategy will save nearly $7M over the next five years in development costs alone. Moving to a SaaS-based CRM and ERP systems will also significantly open up the opportunity to integrate these systems to legacy applications customers have neglected to integrate with their existing on-premise applications. The greater the level of integration between legacy systems and CRM and ERP software suites, the higher the Return on Investment (ROI) and more effective analytics and financial reporting (Borch, Hartvigsen, 1991). Cincom sees the potential in their three year strategic plan to solve long-standing problems that their on-premise software strategies have slowed down sales of their highest-end and most profitable enterprise software. The intent of this analysis is to provide a description of the Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions (CMBS) business unit, perform a SWOT analysis, define how the Web Services plan created with Microsoft will impact their business in the next three years and how this plan will be measured and analyzed for effectiveness.
Essay Doctorate
The 2010 iPad security breach and corporate responsibility
iPad Security Breach and Corporate Ethics
Paper Undergraduate
Technological globalization: literature review methodology and framework
In conducting a literature review, I attempted to identify the most salient issues affecting the current and impending trends in globalization so that I could effectively research them.
Paper Doctorate
Business analytics for customer sentiment analysis in product development
¶ … Opportunities Current Company/Organization Utilize Business Analytic
Paper Undergraduate
Survey research methods and risk assessment frameworks for organizations
Alreck's book offers an effective method in research. The book is a very powerful way to acquire information focused directly and immediately on the decisions and problems of today and those of the future. In addition, the handbook provides the methods and guidelines for conducting practical, economical surveys from start to finish. This resource is particularly valuable for its practicality. In this information age, data is an important asset for today's organizations. In many instances to better assess risk data is needed. Particularly for system institutions such as banks risk is often more important than financial, technical, or human resources. Survey research is a very powerful way to acquire information focused directly and immediately on the decisions and problems of today and those that might occur in the future.
Essay Doctorate
Technology infrastructure planning for a data collection company
The paper discusses the given organization in detail. It analyzes the background of the organization and discusses the line of business in which it operates. In addition to it also analyzes the current outsourcing and offshoring activities of the organization. Apart from that, it puts light on the skills of the IT professionals of the organization and its current information system.