Cloud Computing Assignment -

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 centre 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.

Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data centre at its main site in Bathurst where the company's servers and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure:

• 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD);
• 3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array); 1
• 1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 4 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array);
• 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).

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 centre. 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 centre 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;

The tasks: Your team's task is to prepare a report for Regional Gardens that discusses the following:

1. Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist Regional Gardens to meet the Board's strategy?

i. Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it.

ii. Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures.

2. Describe the risks that you see associated with this new Hybrid Cloud and Microservices strategy. You should name and describe each risk that you identify, and then describe a possible control for the risk. This should be presented in a tabular form.

3. Describe the general Information Security steps and controls that you would recommend to the Board to secure the Hybrid Cloud. You will need to explain to the Board your reasons for recommending these particular security steps.

4. Discuss briefly what you would recommend should be included in Regional Gardens's BCP as a result of their adoption of a Hybrid Cloud and Microservices approach. You will need to consider, as a minimum, the issues of application resilience, backup and disaster recovery in a Hybrid Cloud environment. This section should be no more than 2 pages.

5. Discuss the requirements that Regional Gardens will need to consider in order to conduct remote server administration, resource management and SLA management for its proposed IaaS and PaaS instances (it may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjan's operational checklists for this section). This section should be no more than two to three pages in length.

6. The Regional Gardens board has also decided to move their eMail instance to the AWS cloud in order to begin the migration process, and test their strategy.

i. Describe the steps that you would include in the plan to migrate these services.

ii. What are the critical points and issues that you see occurring at each of these steps? Explain why you see these points or issues as critical.

Note: We are already using IaaS. Our cloud is AWS.