Quality of Service

Industry’s shift towards cloud computing around the world, in recent years, has provided whole set of new IT(information technology) models for the businesses. Cost effective solutions and decrease in maintenance overheads provided by cloud have led businesses to move applications, infrastructure and even development platforms on cloud. Cloud vendors’ market is flourishing with increasing competition and distinguishing benchmarks being set by the vendors to ensure better services and quality. Quality of service(QOS), which is combination matrix of : latency , jitter ,loss and availability parameters, was not a critical factor in the beginning era of clouds but it has now gained significant importance in evaluating different clouds.

Heterogeneity of the clients and applications being hosted by ACME Cloud Co, makes it very important to intelligently manage and control the network and its traffic. In current market scenario, QOS is the decisive factor for the business while choosing any cloud vendor. In today’s world where businesses are becoming more and more dependent on IT solutions and networks, network congestion has become a familiar term. Businesses have moved towards distributed models with various communication needs and dependence on communication channels such as internet , intranet, VOIP, Data and Remote workers via different cloud models: Paas(platform as a service), Iaas(infrastructure as a service) and SaaS(Software as a service). Network congestion or unavailability can lead to huge losses to any businesses with the impact ranging from slow access to apparent connectivity loss. Moreover, with increasing bandwidth requirements of different applications, it has become critical for cloud vendors to manage the resources and network bandwidth effectively. It is possible to manage the network by understanding the bandwidth requirements, type of services, type of activities, usage patterns and types of applications hosted on cloud. Thorough analysis of above mentioned parameters helps in deciding the priorities for different set of applications. For instance, mission critical applications such as website hosting for a famous e-commerce business where revenue is directly linked to availability and quality of service or VOIP would have highest priorities in terms of bandwidth and availability so it becomes important to be able to prioritize these applications and provide the required resources. Non business critical applications such as email and ftp can have moderate to low bandwidth requirements and can have lower priority depending on usage patterns. Capability of providing highest QOS not only enables to effectively utilize the resources but also enables the organization to meet the SLAs( Service Level Agreements).

QOS tracking software helps in analyzing bandwidth requirements of different applications and helps in making required decisions to effectively manage the resources and network. It provides required set of options to visualize and interpret network congestions and alternatives to remove the bottlenecks. By providing the capabilities of managing the QOS in the most effective way, Our Company can manage the most critical factor , QOS , for any business. Cost of the software being proposed is $ 80,000, which may seem little high ,at first , but it would certainly help in gaining the competitive edge in the market against our competitors and would help us in marketing our solutions and attracting future customers.  Additionally, it will help ACME Cloud to save the bandwidth and existing efforts being spent in analyzing and managing network resources by providing an effective user friendly solution to manage QOS for our services. Adding this capability to our organization would not only help us in becoming a more valued Cloud vendor in current  market but would also pave paths to bring organization on track with future requirements of cloud era. Therefore, I would request the board of directors to consider the benefits of the QOS tracking software and its alignment with organization goals so that we can improve on our services and meet the organization objectives more effectively.