Page 262 - Using MIS

230 Chapter 6 The Cloud
Q5 How Can AllRoad Parts Use the Cloud?

AllRoad Parts is a small company with a very small IT Department. As such, it is unlikely to have
the resources necessary to develop its own server infrastructure. Instead, it is far more likely to
take advantage of cloud services provided by cloud vendors.

SaaS Services at AllRoad

Software as a service requires little investment in the hardware and software system compo-
nents. The SaaS vendor administers and manages the cloud servers and makes the software
available, usually as a thin-client. AllRoad will, however, need to transfer existing data, create
new data, develop procedures, and train users.
Some of the SaaS products that AllRoad could use are:

• Google Mail
• Google Drive
• Office 365
• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft CRM OnLine
• And many others . . .
You already know what the first three SaaS offerings are. Salesforce.com and Microsoft’s
CRM OnLine are customer relationship management systems, which you will learn about in
Chapter 7.

PaaS Services at AllRoad

With PaaS, AllRoad leases hardware and operating systems in the cloud from the cloud ven-
dor. For example, it can lease EC2 (Elastic Cloud 2, a PaaS product offered by Amazon.com),
and Amazon.com will preinstall either Linux or Windows Server on the cloud hardware. Given
that basic capability, AllRoad would then install its own software. For example, it could install
its own, in-house developed applications, or it could install an e-commerce server product
licensed from a software vendor. It could also license a DBMS, say SQL Server from Microsoft,
and place it on an EC2 Windows Server instance. In the case of software licensed from others,
AllRoad must purchase licenses that permit replication because Amazon.com will replicate it
when it increases servers.
Some cloud vendors include DBMS products in their PaaS services. Thus, AllRoad could
obtain Windows Servers with SQL Server already installed from the Microsoft Azure cloud of-
ferings. That option is likely what Lucas was considering when he mentioned the $0.25 per hour
per server.
DBMS are also included in other vendors’ cloud offerings. As of June 2014, Amazon.com of-
fers the following DBMS products with EC2:

Simple Database Service A table-oriented DBMS with limited features
Amazon Relational Store: MySQL The full MySQL DBMS product
Amazon Relational Store: Oracle The full Oracle DBMS product

Cassandra A NoSQL DBMS product
MongoDB A NoSQL DBMS product that stores objects in JSON format

Finally, AllRoad might use a CDN to distribute its content worldwide and to respond to
leads generated from advertising as described in Q1.