The cost of migrating to the cloud is not cheap; however, many companies make this transition with the end goal of saving money. Before a company makes a decision to migrate to the cloud, the company should evaluate their existing IT architectures to ensure they minimize risk and maximize benefits of a cloud migration.
Directions: Evaluate the existing IT architectures for Netflix. Write a three to four page summary about the existing IT architecture of Netflix. Include the following in your summary:
• Explain how your company will benefit from migrating to the cloud.
• Describe how migrating to the cloud will affect your company’s applications.
• Analyze potential threats and security issues caused by a migration to the cloud.
• Evaluate required security controls for data and application migration to the cloud.
Once your company has migrated to the cloud, identify network monitoring responsibility.
For all points mentioned above, justify why this information should be migrated to the cloud.
Include proper APA citations (both in-text and references) for any references you use in your research.
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Netflix Cloud
Student’s Name:
Institution:
Netflix Cloud
Organizations and institutions have been increasingly migrating to the cloud to reap maximum benefits while considering the existing organizational IT architecture. The migration to the adoption of the cloud comes with a wide range of benefits and thus organizations have to implement the changes to save on money and other costs. In this regard, the migration to cloud uses the new and the existing IT infrastructure to implement the cloud changes. The organizations migrating to the cloud need to consider and analyze the existing IT infrastructure and their use in the cloud. This fact enables the organization to establish the relevant IT infrastructure to be adopted in the migration. The strategy entails maximizing the existing infrastructure to save on resources and money. Equally important, the adoption of cloud in the organization data management and storage has a wide range of factors and impacts that need to be considered and balanced in the interest of maximizing its advantages in terms of saving. Netflix is one company that will immensely benefit from the adoption cloud as it will reach their customers effectively. Netflix needs to consider its existing IT infrastructure in the adoption of cloud to experience the benefits and other positive impacts.
Netflix IT Infrastructure
Netflix will be in a position to smoothly adopt the cloud operation due to the already existing IT infrastructure. Netflix is involved in publishing and posting content and information online and thus the adoption of cloud will greatly improve the delivery of its services. The Netflix infrastructure is held on the Amazon EC2 with master copies of digital films from various movie studios stored on Amazon S3 (Adhikari et al.,2014). All files are encoded into over 50 different versions based on video resolution and audio quality using machines on the cloud. Data from Netflix is sent to content delivery networks to feed information and content to local ISPs. Consequently, Netflix adopts different open source software such as Hadoop, Cassandra, chelwa, Hive, Apache Tomcat, Gluster, My SQL and Java to present its content to the customer. Furthermore, Netflix has supporting devices that use adaptive bitrate streaming technology to enhance the publishing of videos. Therefore, consumers can access different content using internet-connected devices with Netflix applications. Additionally, the availability of Netflix open connects CDN enables people to access different content and information that are that have low power storage density. Therefore, different Netflix IT infrastructure enables subscribers to access different content and thus the same can be used in the course of migrating to the cloud.
Benefits of Cloud to Netflix
Netflix will benefit immensely in its operations in the course of presenting its content to different subscribers. The adoption of the cloud by Netflix will ensure that the cost of operations is effectively reduced to the advantage of Netflix and its customers (Prince, 2011). The costs of operations are significantly reduced due to the elastic nature of workloads that comes with cloud services. Initially, before the adoption cloud, the company suffered from fixed costs associated with the private data center. The cloud enhances the building elasticity in the application thus ensuring the savings are consistently made thus reducing the costs of operations. Consequently, the adoption of cloud services enhances the change in the management of the organization to improve service delivery. The cloud adoption ensures that insight into some infrastructure is eliminated. Initially, the routine maintenance of AWS on the elastic load balancers resulted in recurrent disruption that affected the management. However, the adoption of the mature configurations management system enhances the effective management of operations since different subsystems are managed to the point of reducing the disruptions.
Impact of cloud on the Netflix application
The adoption of the cloud will have a great impact on Netflix applications. Cloud services increase the availability of the application to 99.9999% (Kratzke, 2018). Initially, it was impossible to increase a high level of availability on the old infrastructure. However, the introduction of the cloud services ensures that there is a great availability to the services in terms of accessibility to content. Additionally, the introduction of cloud services ensures monolithic applications are transformed private data then to AWS VM. This ensures that the application and mode of presentation of content are change. This fact ensures that content is presented with clarity and speed to the benefit of the viewers and company.
Threats and security issues associated with cloud
There different threats and security issues that are associated with the incorporation of cloud services in the operations of Netflix. First data breaches are common with cloud services as the third party gets unauthorized at the expense of the company or the subscribers (Shaikh and Haider, 2011). The data breach ensures the third party to acquire vital and confidential data such as credit card information that can be used against the consumers. On the other hand, the hackers can use insecure APIs such that some members of the public are illegally able to retrieve content and information from Netflix. This makes them to illegally watch content without making subscriptions.
Security controls
There is a need for efficient security controls to counter ant insecurity, threats, and risks. First, there is a need for a robust and effective cloud security framework to counter insecurity and threats (Sabahi, 2011). Security applications need to incorporate authentication, confidentiality, authorization, auditing, availability, and integrity. On the other hand, Netflix needs to install detection and intrusion software to detect and establish threats such that they can be acted in time and reduce their negative impact. The responsibility of monitoring and security the organization network and security need to be implemented in the entire organization.
Conclusion
Netflix needs to adopt cloud services by improving the existing infrastructure to benefit different advantages. There are different benefits associated with cloud services that will be retrieved from cloud services. Additionally, different factors need to be considered in the implementations of cloud services by Netflix such as the impacts of the cloud services, threats and insecurity, and security controls.
References
Adhikari, V. K., Guo, Y., Hao, F., Hilt, V., Zhang, Z. L., Varvello, M., & Steiner, M. (2014). Measurement study of Netflix, Hulu, and a tale of three CDNs. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 23(6), 1984-1997.
Kratzke, N. (2018). A brief history of cloud application architectures. Applied Sciences, 8(8), 1368.
Prince, J. D. (2011). Introduction to cloud computing. Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, 8(4), 449-458.
Sabahi, F. (2011, May). Cloud computing security threats and responses. In 2011 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Communication Software and Networks (pp. 245-249). IEEE.
Shaikh, F. B., & Haider, S. (2011, December). Security threats in cloud computing. In 2011 International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (pp. 214-219). IEEE.
