Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterp
ID: 3701641 • Letter: R
Question
Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services.
The company is considering the following strategic proposal:
They plan to retain the Bathurst data center for data storage. This would entail updating their Active Directory and data storage infrastructure, and moving all other infrastructure into the Cloud.
They plan to initially move all their Web Services into the Cloud in order to provide an increased level of HA (High Availability) as well as a better degree of flexibility in supplying data to their customers and employees. This would entail changing their current web software architecture to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability that can be gained by moving to a Microservices model (this would entail the use of such services as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, Containers, Data Services, and Cloud Edge capability and monitoring).
They also plan to migrate their LoB (Line of Business) applications to a Cloud Infrastructure to increase their flexibility and availability.
The Board of Regional Gardens is contemplating this strategy as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness. The Board also expects to achieve significant savings on the cost of maintaining their ICT infrastructure by closing their existing data center. They appreciate that this would entail retraining for their existing ICT staff so that they can manage the new Cloud based infrastructure.
Regional Gardens has again approached you to advise them on this strategy. You have already advised Regional Gardens that this strategic approach will mean that they will need to ultimately design and operate a “Hybrid Cloud” methodology, where part of their data center is “on premise” and another part in a Cloud.
Regional Gardens also plan to run a Risk and Security Workshop to assess the risks, security issues and possible methods of control that will be required with this “Hybrid Cloud” approach. You will be required to organise, run and facilitate this workshop.
The Board is also concerned about how this strategy will affect their BCP (Business Continuity Plan) and their backup and disaster recovery strategies.
Tasks
Your team has been engaged to provide a risk assessment for MetaSoft in their planned move to a Hybrid Cloud strategy.
Team Setup
This assignment is a team assignment. The rationale for using a team approach is that most IT risk management assessments are normally done by teams of between 2-5 Architects, Information Security experts, Operations and Business leaders for each problem. You will be assigned to a team and the team, as a whole, will be responsible for the development of the risk assessment.
Team Member Responsibilities
Each team member will be assessed on:
The final risk assessment presented by the team;
The individual contributions that they have made to the risk assessment. This will be shown by the entries that they have made in the Team forum;
Team members should note that:
A total of 20% of the total marks for this assignment are for individual contributions. These include:
Selection of issues for risk assessment (10%), and
Reasoning behind the risk assessment for the selected issues (10%)
A team member without any individual contributions in the Team Forum will be regarded as having not contributed to the risk assessment. This will result in either reduced marks or no marks being awarded to that team member for this assignment.
The tasks:
Your team’s task is to prepare a report for Regional Gardens that discusses the following:
Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist Regional Gardens to meet the Board’s strategy?
Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it. (10 marks)
Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures. (10 marks)
Explanation / Answer
Q1) Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist Regional Gardens to meet the Board’s strategy?
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): - Infrastructure as a Service, sometimes abbreviated as IaaS, contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT and typically provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. Infrastructure as a Service provides you with the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources and is most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): - Platforms as a service remove the need for organizations to manage the underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems) and allow us to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps us be more efficient as we don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
Software as a Service (SaaS): - Software as a Service provides us with a completed product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, whe we are referring to Software as a Service are referring to end-user applications. With a SaaS offering we do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed; you only need to think about how you will use that particular piece software. A common example of a SaaS application is web-based email where you can send and receive email without having to manage feature additions to the email product or maintaining the servers and operating systems that the email program is running on.
Q2) Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it
Q3) Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures.
Advantages:-
Disadvantages:-
Please let me know in case of any clarifications required. Thanks!