Company Profile
Don & Associates is a financial consulting company that provides a wide range of professional and qualified services for both small- and medium-sized firms in terms of competent and correct organization of a company’s resource management. Therefore, the firm aims to maximize customer satisfaction by providing qualified assistance and support. In this case, Don & Associates focuses on implementing transparency and manageability of a business, contributing to its development, growth, and prosperity within the framework of supplying affordable solutions to all customers’ financial situations. The building of a professional team, formation of a product line covering the needs of businesses of any size, consistent improvement in the quality of work and customer service, increased sales by attracting new clients and expanding cooperation with existing ones, as well as increasing scope of activities to neighboring states in Northeast regions are the key strategic goals of Don & Associates. Today, the company is taking active steps to implement cloud solutions in terms of reducing IT costs, business continuity, scalability, flexibility of working methods, efficiency of cooperation, and access to automatic updates. This initiative will make it possible to realize the designated purposes of Don & Associates thoroughly.
Company Struggles
Considering the firm’s exponential growth at certain stages of the life cycle, Don & Associates faces a number of technical and technological complications that hinder the efficient and productive conduct of activities and the corresponding profit. Currently, the large-scale and rapid development and spread of the global network entails a change in the characteristics of doing business and the emergence of new forms and ways of interacting with customers. Virtual reality is embedded in every person’s daily life and has become an integral part of it. In a sense, such a large-scale event requires Don & Associates to adapt to new conditions by updating hardware and software, taking into account maintenance expenses. For example, in the company to this day, employees get access to services from one device, thereby complicating their tasks, taking into account new achievements in the field of IT. Thus, the organization’s struggles are associated mainly with the expansion of business processes in the aspect of the “quality:costs” ratio and the use of innovative technologies and revolutionary solutions in the performance of professional operations.
Due to this circumstance, Don & Associates needs cloud scalability as one of the best solutions to mitigate the problems mentioned earlier and guarantee software performance. In this situation, scalability is a way to increase service delivery capacity and quality, allowing the organization to cope with sudden loads (Al-Said Ahmad & Andras, 2019). Unlike competitors, unique technologies would bring more than 50% faster revenue growth (“12 benefits of cloud computing,” n.d.). With the introduction of cloud computing, several company employees can simultaneously access specific data from the computing environment. Hence, Donyelle’s decision to switch to cloud systems would create an efficient, cost-effective, and competitive business.
Current Infrastructure
Primarily, it is known that the headquarter of Don & Associates is the location of the physical infrastructure. In addition, it has a specially designated room for several databases. Thus, the servers are running the Windows Server Operating System. In fact, owning this type of system is not the best solution for the company since there is a high probability of destroying all critical data due to unforeseen circumstances, such as a fire or flood. Accordingly, the firm urgently needs to put into practice the initiative for the introduction of cloud computing in order to back up information and further the possibility of data recovery. For Don & Associates, as a medium-sized business, this will be a profitable decision: the IT budget is saved with higher reliability and security. Modern cloud services are more reliable than their storage because even a simple Word document in the cloud takes forever — it will not disappear anywhere until a person deletes it. Significantly, this moment is relevant for Don & Associates as the owner of serious systems for storing and processing commercial information.
Top Three Cloud Services Providers
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most widespread cloud platform with the broadest capabilities, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. On a single platform, users can order computing resources, storage, infrastructure, and services with ready-to-use tools: Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), Identity Access Management (IAM), as well as Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). The prices of the services from Amazon depend on a company’s decision regarding the choice of one or more such fundamental aspects as “pay-as-you-go,” “save-when-you-commit,” and “pay-less-by-using-more” (BasuMallick, 2022). For example, for using EC2, an organization will pay $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB per month, and operating S3 will cost $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month (BasuMallick, 2022). Accordingly, access to these services is possible via the Internet, private network, or VPN.
Amazon provides free round-the-clock essential support for all AWS customers and more advanced help for developers, businesses, and enterprises. Accordingly, assistance for companies includes Trusted Advisor technical support (SADOS Team, 2018). In this case, Amazon offers recommendations on architecture support, business management reviews, infrastructure event administration, and much more. In addition, ASW has a unique global infrastructure delivering hundreds of services from data centers worldwide. Amazon servers are located in more than 27 regions with 87 availability zones, and these indicators are constantly increasing. This distribution scale helps to quickly launch applications around the world, manage workloads and deploy systems closer to users to achieve minimal response latency.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a set of integrated cloud services for analysis, computing, database management, mobile solutions, networking, data storage, and web technologies — all for fast and cost-effective work; it offers three service models: Iaas, PaaS, and SaaS. Microsoft Azure “assistance” allows companies to avoid the complexities and additional costs associated with replacing existing equipment, managing the underlying infrastructure, and providing more efficient management of IT budgets: customers pay for the resources they need.
Compared to AWS, Microsoft Azure provides a slightly low price for services. For example, storage costs start at $0.0184 per GB per month for the hot tier; over time, prices decrease for large amounts of storage (“Azure pricing: The complete guide,” n.d.). More than 40 Microsoft Azure services are available for free for 12 months. However, getting more innovative solutions requires investments. This service has several support options; companies should choose Comprehensive Microsoft Technology Support or Professional Direct since these variants already include consultations with specialists and management of escalation of high-severity incidents using a joint management pool. One should also mention that the Azure global infrastructure includes critical elements such as physical infrastructure and connecting network components.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
The global Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a set of solutions from Google Corporation for creating and developing cloud products that provide services in IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS formats. GCP contains tools consisting of ready-made infrastructure, resources, management instruments, and cloud services (cloud computing, analytics and data storage, and machine learning) (Knox, 2021). Therefore, GCP makes it easy to create, control, and use clouds for different tasks, such as creating cloud infrastructures, computing and hosting, migrating to the cloud, and much more (Kuzmenko, 2021). The comparative characteristic demonstrates that Google Cloud is cheaper than AWS and Azure. As a rule, GCP services are 25-50% cheaper than competitors (Kuzmenko, 2021). Google Cloud offers are publicly available to billions of users.
The advantages of using Google Cloud for companies are to provide an integrated experience, an advanced level of support, flexibility, and a permanent partnership model for making predictive decisions. Today, this infrastructure is used as a base for several high-speed global Google services, including Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Search. All services require effective management, supplied by a whole set of tools. Google’s cloud platform allows one to use infrastructure, resources, and management tools.
Recommended Cloud Service Provider
Based on the analysis of the data obtained, their comparison, and further interpretation, it should be concluded that the choice of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as a cloud service provider is one of the most reliable and secure solutions for Don & Associates for the first time based on the following reasons. Firstly, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will minimize the cost of services, taking into account the first experience of interacting with cloud systems. This is a more open and cost-effective service than AWS, which has profound knowledge in the field of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Secondly, GCP makes working with cloud storage simple and convenient. For example, AWS charges a fee for each new account that appears on the server, and this can be very inconvenient when employees in the company are working on one project on the cloud. Thus, GCP makes it possible to create multiple accounts for one project, and at the same time, the fee is charged only for storing the project and not for the adjacent accounts. Thirdly, A fast and uninterrupted connection is what else GCP can offer that AWS cannot present. With hundreds and thousands of miles of fiber around the world, GCP can offer Don & Associates high-quality performance.
Summary
Thus, summarizing the above information, it is necessary to state that Don & Associates is a financial consulting company whose goals, missions, and values are based mainly on expanding and improving services. The decision of Don & Associates to switch to cloud storage systems is one of the most relevant. Considering growth and development, the business is forced to continuously face constant changes in information technology and the latest innovations. This circumstance requires the company to adapt immediately to survive in the industry and maintain competitiveness. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the three most well-known and reliable cloud services. Nevertheless, based on the picture of the situation of Don & Associates, the company is recommended to choose GCP as a provider in the field of cloud services in terms of more effortless experience with the service and cost reduction.
References
12 benefits of cloud computing. (n.d.). Salesforce, Inc. Web.
Al-Said Ahmad, A., & Andras, P. (2019). Scalability analysis comparisons of cloud-based software services. Journal of Cloud Computing, 8(1), 1-17.
Azure pricing: The complete guide. (n.d.). NetApp, Inc. Web.
BasuMallick, C. (2022). What is AWS? Overview, services, and pricing calculator. Spiceworks Inc. Web.
Knox, K. (2021). What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?. Serverless Heroes, Inc. Web.
Kuzmenko, E. (2021). AWS vs GCP. Comparative Guide 2021: CDN, pricing, biggest drawbacks. Kitrum. Web.
SADOS Team. (2018). AWS support plans: Learning about Amazon’s web server system. SADOS. Web.