1.Before going into more detailed questions: is your company already using cloud-based services (such as web applications)? Or do you exclusively use on-premise services? Are there some activities for which your company allows the use of cloud-based services and others for which it is forbidden? Are there some specific data which are not allowed to leave your premises? If you do use cloud-services, what are these services (name, functionality, provider…)?
2.In the context of the project, developing the FlexPlan planning tool as a cloud-based service is bringing many benefits in terms of agility, scalability and ease of adoption (described above). If you had to use or participate in the development of the FlexPlan planning tool, would you consider these benefits as valuable? Have you encountered such benefits or additional ones when using/developing another cloud-based service?
3.However, from the point of view of the real usage (future exploitation), a System Operator could feel it unacceptable to use a cloud-based service due to security concerns or pose limitations. Then, we must be aware of the implementation of the FlexPlan planning tool in order to comply with security constraints. Would you have these concerns or other ones if you were using the FlexPlan planning tool? What is the current policy in your organization regarding data security?
4.To make the FlexPlan planning tool appropriately secured, HTTPS data transfer is used and the service is protected with IP whitelisting and basic authentication (username + password). Additionally, no data is persisted to drives after processing (“stateless”). Would these security mechanisms bring you confidence to use the FlexPlan planning tool? Do you consider some of them as unneeded? Would you require other security mechanisms to use the FlexPlan planning tool? A foreseen alternative to IP whitelisting was to implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Would your answers be different in that case?
5.The “stateless” operation of the FlexPlan planning tool prevents us to adopt a database which would simplify a lot the input data management. One of the main challenges that we are facing in the project is therefore the ability to transfer a large amount of data in a reasonable time to the cloud service. Have you already faced similar or different challenges when using/developing another cloud-based service? What workarounds did you use/implement to mitigate your challenges? Would you agree to use the FlexPlan planning tool if your data was saved in a database as long as your request is successfully acknowledged on your side? What would be the conditions?
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