Executive Summary
The mission and vision of Infotronics is to become a foremost Cloud broker that will be noted for its effective workforce and delivery of efficient services to its customers. With a startup workforce strength of ten staff, and one operational location, the company intends to expand its operations to five locations within the next two years. Infotronics is expected to occupy substantial market share within a short time. The firm however, requires startup funding to kick start operation. It is expected to rely on large patronage from customer for future funding of its operations and growth. The drive for upward customer patronage is expected as there is great advantage of running a company’s business on the cloud as compared with on-premise. Customers would want to leverage these advantages to boost their own businesses. (Longbottom, 2017, p. 25),
Introduction
The disruption to normal work culture caused by COVID-19 pandemic had far reaching effect. Many workers had to work from home; many others were quarantined after contacting the virus. These events dramatically changed the traditional workplace. Management in many organizations were forced to decide on adopting working from home while the pandemic last. This new work culture was not without its attendant problems. Working from home increased the vulnerability of data and network infrastructures, as it provided hackers wider footprint to carry out “man in middle” and other attacks on customers and businesses through the communication channels linking the home and business. Many organizations became vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Infotronics is stepping in to offer to organizations an opportunity to run their businesses on a low cost and effective platform that is affordable and yet guarantees the security of their data infrastructure and networks. Infotronics will leverage the technological advantages that virtualization brings to cloud computing.
Business Value Proposition
Infotronics is a startup business that is committed to migrate the on-premises systems to the cloud in a safe and secured manner that competitors could ever imagine to achieve. The level of security that is offered to businesses that host their IT infrastructure with Infotronics, in terms of quality and cost is beyond what individual customers can afford on their own, thereby ensuring total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction for the customer(Ko & Choo, 2015, p. 21). Enterprise customers are guaranteed to have value for their money by availing themselves access to this service.
Business Value Canvas
It is worth describing the nine elements that feature under the business value canvas as it pertains to the business of Infotronics.
Value Proposition
Meeting the customer’s IT needs in a secured and cost effective manner is an important value delivery process. The cost of running secured on-premises is not within the reach of many businesses; this in addition to operational cost and energy requirement poses a huge funding burden on businesses. As a cloud broker, Infotonics will negotiate on behalf of the customer by interfacing directly with the cloud service provider and thereby shielding the customer from the technical complexities associated with cloud services integration. The value proposition allowed a customer is outlined later in the cloud brokering architecture
Key Partners
By nature of the Cloud brokering business, Infotronics will participate in inter-cloud initiative with cloud providers to succeed. For the company to service distributed application and ensure failover and fault tolerant operation (Grozev & Buyya, 2014), it must of necessity partner with cloud providers. Some of the providers form a federation with other clouds providers, in such situation the partnership become an extended one.
Key Resources
Infotronics would source human and material resources required to operate and support the business. Human resources would be required in areas of engineering, marketing, sales and operations, while financial resources are needed to cater for inventory and licenses etc.
Custmer Relationship
We understand the central role customer relationship plays with the other parts of the canvas, and as such our customer relationship is geared towards reinventing a new customer experience to cloud brokerage service. We are committed to maintain a dedicated personal assistance to our customer. Our customers’ experience will reflect the kind of references the customers will give about our services. Good reference will in turn boost the acquisition and retention of future customers. We intend to operate round the clock network operations to ensure fast problem resolution for our customers.
Channels
The choice of channel strategy, comprising marketing, selling and supporting the customer is very important to support sustainably (Joyce & Paquin, 2016, p. 21). Infotronics will market its product through various channels such as email marketing, advertising and magazine articles. Sales will be subscription and e-commerce based. To support our customers, we will use various channels such as websites, online chat, phone and on-site visits. These channels have been chosen to deliver the best customer experience for our customers.
Customer Agent
The company being a startup will focus on a single customer segment to deliver value proposition. The Enterprise customer segment has been chosen to be the first on the list. The company will diversify into other segments in the future.
Key Activities
Our key activities will focus on integrating cloud based services that is ordinarily too complex for our customers to implement, and also negotiate the relationship between the cloud service providers and our customers. We will perform the two functions for our clients:
Cost Structure
The cost structure adopted by the company was motivated by the desire to strike a balance between cost driven and value driven structures, with the core objective to deliver low cost.
Revenue Stream and Pricing
Flat hourly prices will be the pricing model customers will use to pay for the services they receive. The projected revenue flow is as shown in the return on investment (ROI) table below: Return on Investment (ROI)
Figure 1 Revenue stream and pricing
Implementation of Security between users
The trust boundaries of users overlap, therefore, user’s IT resources are segmented into logical network parameters by assigning them to at least one logical cloud-based security group. How one logical cloud-based security group communicates with others is dependent on specific rules assigned to each group.
Cloud Architecture
Figure 2 shows the components of the brokering architecture used in the project. The three roles that are typical of cloud brokering service are prominent, being the user, the cloud providers, and the cloud broker. A set of virtual resources comprising compute, network and storage are exposed to the user in the form of service description templates to enable the user make requests. The template includes optimization criteria that has elements such as the total infrastructural capacity and set constraints e.g. the maximum number of virtual machines of a given type.
Figure 2: Cloud brokering architecture illustrating roles and outlines operations of a cloud broker
Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM)
The VIM which is implemented by OpenNebula, abstracts the heterogeneity of the different provider interfaces to present a unified interface for the user. The virtual infrastructures expose the respective IP addresses of the infrastructure components to the user. However, the resources can also be assessed with the use of standard applications such as secure shell or batch queue systems (Tordsson et al., 2012, p. 5).
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Single sign-on mechanism is implemented for users so that a user that is authenticated by a security broker with established security context that persists while the user accesses other cloud services or cloud IT resources. Otherwise, the cloud user would have to re-authenticate between services and resources.
Cloud Applications
Customers who utilize the cloud brokerage service are given access to cloud IT resources from diverse cloud providers. These services align with NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (Bohn et al.) as shown in the figure below
Figure 3 Cloud applications
The Cloud broker segment of the model as shown in figure 3 is responsible for providing service intermediation, service aggregation and service arbitrage
Service Mediation
As part of its service offering to customers, Infotronics provides value-added services to consumers by improving some specific capabilities. These improvements are applicable to managing access to the cloud services, identity management, performance reporting and enhanced security etc.
Service Aggregation
Multiple services are combined or integrated into one or new services through service aggregation
Service arbitrage
This makes it optional for Infotronics to choose the type of services from service providers it wants to include in its catalogue.
Conclusion
The purpose of this cloud business development is to avail customers the access to cost effective and value added cloud broker service. In the standard cloud model Consumers access only one cloud service, in the event of failure, the outcome is very disastrous, hence the need for multiple cloud providers linked up by a broker service. The cloud broker service is guaranteed to prevent total failure from happening. Fault-tolerance is insured because the consumer’s workload would failover from the hosting cloud provider to access another cloud provider’s resources in the event of a system failure. The consumers would also enjoy the benefit of superior protection of their data that Infotronics guarantees. In addition, consumers do not have to worry about legislative requirement as to which geographic location their data is stored, because the many datacenters of the various cloud providers provide many options of where data can be stored.
Reference
Bohn, R. B., Messina, J., Fang, L., Jin, T., & Jian, M. (2011). NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture.
Joyce, A., & Paquin, R. L. (2016). The triple layered business model canvas: A tool to design more sustainable business models. Journal of cleaner production, 135, 1474-1486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067
Ko, R., & Choo, R. (2015). The cloud security ecosystem : technical, legal, business and management issues. Syngress.
Longbottom, C. (2017). The evolution of cloud computing : how to plan for change (1st edition ed.). BCS Learning & Development.
p>Tordsson, J., Montero, R. S., Moreno-Vozmediano, R., & Llorente, I. M. (2012). Cloud brokering mechanisms for optimized placement of virtual machines across multiple providers. Future generation computer systems, 28(2), 358-367. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2011.07.003