Assessment 1 - Concepts and Models

1. SoftArc Engineering, a local engineering company has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud computing in their daily operations. They have a series of staff that work on different projects in different parts of the country and are looking to provide them with office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files. What are the critical points, other than cost, that you need to consider in order to prepare your advice for this company? Your report to SoftArc should be about 2 pages.

2. SoftArc Engineering is considering using an IaaS provider to host some of its computing infrastructure. They have asked you to prepare a report for them that describes the difference between locally hosted computing infrastructure consisting of servers, storage and network the SoftArc data centre, and similar infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider. What are the critical points, other than cost, that an enterprise would need to consider in choosing to migrate services and storage from local hosted infrastructure to an IaaS service provider. Your report to SoftArc should be about 2 pages.

3. SoftArc engineering is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. SoftArc has deployed Microsoft Exchange 2012 in its data centre to provide email services to all 250 employees. It has also deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2013 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its employees. The SharePoint 2013 instance has been extensively customised to suit SoftArc's needs and also Runs Project Central, their Project Management tool as a separate application from within SharePoint. All employees have the Microsoft Office 2013 suite of office automation products installed on their respective desktops or laptops. SoftArc want you to report on: S

1. Should SoftArc move to a SaaS provider in order to provide email and office automation services for their employees? What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving to a SaaS provider for these services?

2. SoftArc would like to move its SharePoint 2013 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users in remote locations. What is the best model (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) for SoftArc to use for this service? Choose the model that you consider most appropriate for this service and discuss why the model you chose is the most appropriate for the SharePoint service.

3. Your report for this question should be no more than 3 pages.

Assessment 2- Risk Management and Security

Task

The Department of Spatial Information (DSI) is a State Government department. The major functions of DSI is to provide accurate and timely spatial information to other Government departments, but also to make some of this spatial information available to the public. In order to provide both the government and public services , DSI has developed a number of web services that deliver this information through a number of internally developed applications. This suite of web services and applications is referred to as the DSI Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS).

DSI have a number of new projects being developed that are expected to increase the demand for its spatial data dramatically. The Executive Management of DSI have looked at a number of proposals to support these new programs. The two alternatives they are investigating are:

1. Increasing the internal DSI Data Centre capacity to host and support the new projects in the OSDS. This would probably need a 50% increase in web infrastructure and support services within the Department. This would necessitate an increase in data centre infrastructure, server numbers as well as a major increase in the bandwidth available to DSI.

2. Migrating the OSDS to a Cloud provider. This would allow DSI to continue to develop and refine the data in its internal Maintenance systems and then move a copy of the completed data to the cloud-based Delivery system for publication.

DSI Management is planning to adopt Proposal 2 but have asked you to give them a report that looks at the following aspects of the proposal:

1. What model should DSI adopt for a cloud-based OSDS?

2. How should DSI assess the risk of adopting a cloud-based OSDS?

3. What steps should DSI take to provide adequate security for the OSDS?

Assessment 3 - Management, Backup and DR

Task

The Department of Spatial Information (DSI) has considered your assessment of the deployment model, risk management and security issues for the Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS). They have decided that they need an additional assessment on the technical management and the SLA.

You have been assigned the task of providing DSI Executive Management with an assessment of the management requirements and the provisions of the SLA for the chosen cloud vendor. You are to:

1. Discuss the requirements for remote administration, resource management and SLA management. It may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjan's operational checklists for DSI's OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.

2. Discuss briefly how you will consider application resilience, backup and disaster recovery for your chosen provider in relation to OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.

3. Use Erl's SLA guidelines to assess the SLA for your chosen provider. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.

4. Provide a covering one to two page executive summary of these two assessments to DSI Executive Management and summarise the major opportunities and risks that have been identified in your assessments.