Examples for Cloud Deployment Models in a Business Environment
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Safari. A unique login for Office 365 gives the user the opportunity to modify
presentations on the go, edit Word documents in the browser or perform calculations
with Excel Online (Faltus, 2013).
Although Microsoft guarantees a 99.9% uptime, a company will not be able to use
the services during a downtime – as described in Chapter 7.1.4 - Availability. Hence
about 42 minutes per month the services are planned to be unavailable. Such a
downtime has an impact on productivity and as is causing costs for the company as
well.
Another potential pitfall describes Erich Seher (2013): VOITH uses Exchange with
public folders, which all employees can access. In these folders customer orders
are stored, know-how is exchanged and so on. When using only Office 365,
meaning no local distribution of Office, these public folders are shifted into the cloud,
implying know-how off-premise. According to Seher it is only possible to keep public
folders on-premise, when an upgrade to the current (local) Microsoft Office
installation is performed. This would mean to upgrade 25,000 work places, implying
huge investment costs. Another immediate risk for VOITH is the issue of encryption.
A few employees, including Erich Seher as CIO, use encrypted e-mails, based on a
point-to-point encryption with two unique keys. Office 365 currently does not offer
such a type of encryption.
8.4
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com offers Customer Relationship Management software, which is
provided as Software-As-A-Service. Salesforce currently has over 43,000 business
customers and more than 1 Million subscribers. The prices range between USD 9
per user and month for limited functionalities to USD 65 per user and month for
enhanced versions for big enterprises. Implementing a Salesforce CRM solution in
a company usually takes up to 3 months, while subscribers do not need to buy
additional hardware, servers, operating systems or databases. Furthermore no
additional licensing models need to be bought. Salesforce’s software can be
accessed using only a Webbrowserinterface. However customers do run the chance
