Our focus on subscription-based solutions are designed to significantly reduce CUNY technology infrastructure investments, simplify and accelerate IT adoption, enhance each users productivity and experience through their own Virtual Work Environment. If accepted, our proposal will deliver value to CUNY through reduced cost and more predictable IT diligence, a virtual work environment that is user-specific, reliable, and easy to use; as well as a significantly reduced need to invest large capital in server hardware, software, security, and storage.
All this can happen without having to replace CUNY existing IT infrastructure. With an externally managed and hosted IT function, CUNY will not only eliminate excess costs and enhance ROI more quickly, but will also promote the development for individual schools and departments that might otherwise find it challenging in today’s high-cost computing environment. Specifically, our team will focus almost exclusively on Cloud Computing which provides access to applications in a Virtual Work Environment. However, to be fair, there are other participants in the field who also offer varying levels of service.
Players such as Accentuate, IBM Global Services, and Hewlett Packard cater to the largest global corporations, offering application hosting and other select services on a very large scale. Cloud computing also offers applicability to the Small and Medium-Business market as well through corporate services such Amazon Web Services, Apple’s cloud and Yahoo Small Business, since small and medium-sized businesses have limited resources, economies of scale and smaller user-bases which would certainly benefit from an integrated utility services and solutions offerings . Cloud Computing is changing the face of technology implementation and delivery.
It levels the playing field for both businesses and consumers. A Cloud infrastructure, virtual in nature and linked to the web, offers significantly more capabilities, performance and flexibility at a lower price tag and lower level of complexity than more traditional local onsite servers. Given the early stage of this trend, security, support, and bandwidth issues remain of concern, but it is clear that Cloud Computing is penetrating the business and home environment at an accelerating pace. 2 OBJECTIVES As we mentioned in our introduction, this team will propose how to move the City University system into the Cloud.
Our strategic objective is to sign up all of the students, the faculty and the staff of the City University of New York. The City University of New York is gigantic and Just happens to be the leading urban public university in the United States, serving 540,000 students at 24 institutions in New York City. The University includes eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, an Honors College, the Graduate School and University Center, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the CUNY School of Law, the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and the CUNY School of Public Healthy.
For Fiscal Year 2010, CUNY published an overall operating budget of $2. 6 billion in its annual reports. While CUNY did not release the exact amount it spends on IT infrastructure, it is certain that IT was a substantial part of the budget and savings can realistically be achieved once many of our IT services are moved to the cloud. In the past, equipping a school with computers meant procuring dozens, if not hundreds, of stand-alone machines, each with its own monitor, case, mouse, keyboard, and software.
Administrators worried about the cost of both the physical machines and the software licenses. The IT department lamented over the knowledge that no single machine would ever use all of its available capacity. Power and capability were paid for, but were never completely used. The school computer workstations we have in front of us right now are expensive, inefficient and often become clogged with viruses and mallard. In today’s world of shrinking school budgets and growing demands on CUNY to cut costs and raise student performance simultaneously, expensive and inefficient Just won’t do.
With our help, CUNY will soon discover the benefits of cloud computing. Cloud Computing will enable our schools to store more information on fewer servers, streamline operations and free IT personnel from time-consuming maintenance asks, all while generating significant savings. The elimination of the physical thick- client computer will reduce cable clutter, free up workspace and cut heat emissions in crowded computer labs. Thin-client devices can be wiped clean at the end of every user session, simplifying management and increasing security.
As you will see, the benefits of Cloud Computing will not stop at the IT Department; they will extend to the entire learning environment. WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING? Cloud computing is the use of computing resources that are delivered as a service over a network, which is usually the internet. The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user’s data, software and computations.
There are many types of public cloud computing: Infrastructure as a service (alas) Platform as a service (Pas) Software as a service (AAAS) Storage as a service (Stats) Security as a service (Cases) Data as a service (Dads) Test environment as a service (Teas) Desktop as a service (Dads) API as a service (Pappas) The business model, IT as a service (Task), is used by in-house, IT organizations from rims that offer any or all of the above services. Using software as a service, users rent application software and databases.
The cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms on which the applications run. End users access cloud- based applications through a web browser or a thin-client or mobile app while the business software and user’s data are stored on servers at a remote location. Proponents claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance. 5 Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of call similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network.
At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services . 6 History The origin of the term cloud computing is obscure, but it appears to derive from the practice of using drawings of stylized clouds to denote networks in diagrams of computing and communications systems. The word cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the standardized use of a cloud-like shape to denote a network on telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in computer outwork diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents.
The cloud symbol was used to represent the Internet as early as 1994. The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the responsibility of the provider and that which was the responsibility of the users. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructures. It is the current availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware fertilization and service-oriented architecture that have led to the tremendous Roth in cloud computing. After the dot. Com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers, which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of their capacity at any one time. Having found that the new cloud architecture resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements whereby small, fast-moving teams could add new features faster and more easily, Amazon initiated a new product development effort to provide cloud computing to external customers, and launched Amazon Web Service in 2006. 9
In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, Amazon Web Service API- compatible platform for deploying private clouds. In early 2008, Penumbral, enhanced by the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds. In the same year, efforts were focused on providing quality of service guarantees (as required by real-time interactive applications) to cloud-based infrastructures, in the framework of the RUMORS European Commission-funded project, resulting in a real-time cloud environment.
By mid-2008, the IT community awe an opportunity for cloud computing to shape the relationship among consumers of IT services, those who use IT services and those who sell them. Organizations began switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models. On March 1, 2011, IBM announced the Smarter Computing framework to support Smarter Planet. Among the various components of the Smarter Computing foundation, cloud computing is a critical piece. 0 THE NEED The entire CUNY system faces an increasingly complex IT burden, as hardware and software become more prolific, networks become faster and larger, storage and covers needs increase, security exposures become more critical and technological advancements crowd the marketplace. Complexity leads to additional costs and delays, and without the cloud, CUNY will need more infrastructure and people to evaluate options, select appropriate solutions, and correctly set up and deploy each element and then manage it all.
