Cloud Computing to the Rescue

The cost of building and maintaining an organizational computing ecosystem has become a bigger part of most organizations' budgets. Organizations have been looking for ways to reduce this cost. One of the solutions has been to look to the delivery of computing as a service by outside vendors. The delivery and provisioning of computing as a service by vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and many others is known as Cloud Computing. There are public, private, and hybrid cloud computing environments. In this assignment, consider only the public cloud computing environments.

Cloud computing provides scalable computing resources, software applications, data storage, and networking infrastructure at cost below what would cost an organization to provide an equivalent infrastructure internally.

Describe the hardware, software, and network architectural design of the infrastructure used to build cloud computing infrastructures.

Use Microsoft Visio to prepare the architectural diagrams.

Compare and contrast scalability, benefits, disaster recovery, and opportunities for businesses when using cloud-based computing environments compared to a non-cloud-based environments.

Analyze hardware virtualization (virtual machines, virtual networks, and virtual desktops ) used by most Cloud Computing environments.

Evaluate if you would prefer a virtualized environment to a non-virtualized environment for a midsized organization or business. Describe why or why not.

Compare the cloud computing cost models used by Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2.

Select the cloud computing cost model that you would use for a public cloud solution.