17.10 > Your company wishes to move from using desktop applications to accessing the same functionality remotely as services. Identify three risks that might arise and suggest how these risks may be reduced.
- Security - there is definitely a risk that the information needed for the company will be less secure if it is able to be accessed remotely. This risk may be reduced by implementing extra security precautions as well as decreasing accessibility of information to only certain parties.
- Failure Management - if the system is available remotely as a service, it becomes more complicated with many more parts involved in the success of the system. The system will rely on all components (the computer, the server, access to the server) functioning properly in order to work. So there is a higher risk that the system will fail because there are more components that need to work together.
- Transparency - because of the different components that have to work together, there is a higher risk that users will be aware of flaws in the system and inconsistencies in the software. I found this really great research paper from a student at the University of Texas. Author Sudheer Mantena discusses "Transparency in Distributed Systems":
- Transparency: The distributed systems should be perceived as a single entity by the users or the application programmers rather than as a collection of autonomous systems, which are cooperating. The users should be unaware of where the services are located and also the transferring from a local machine to a remote one should also be transparent. (Page 2)