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.
Transparency: The most frequent risk when migrating a service to a distributed model is the risk of keeping the system transparent to the user. A distributed system is larger, more complex, and generally does not have a single point of control. This means that in the average case the service will have to do far more work behind the curtains to achieve the same level of productivity or interactiveness as the desktop equivalent. Often it is not even possible to achieve the equivalent appearance of the desktop service. Keeping this in mind, a possible solution is to show this process to the user and show them enough information for them to understand how and why the new version is experiencing issues. This could possibly allow for users to optimize the service further.
Failure: Another very common risk is failure. As this chapter says, failure is inevitable regardless of the system. However in a distributed system there are far more possible points of failure that need to be accounted for. The key to reducing the risk of failure is using fault tolerant techniques such as self monitoring to record, report, mitigate, and recover from failures in order to preserve the integrity of the overall service.
Security: Possibly the most serious risk is security in a distributed system. As this chapter specifies, a distributed system must be able to combat possible cases of interception, interruption, modification, and fabrication. The kicker is that this has to apply across all of the different hardware/software structures that participate in the distributed system because any of these could possibly be used as a point of entry for an attacker. The most standard risk management tool for this issue would be to use encryption and authentication for each possible point of entry.