MetaSoft Ltd is a software development company which works across Australia and New Zealand.

The company is considering the following strategic proposal:

- They plan to close down the Melbourne data centre rather than update or replace the older infrastructure. The existing data and services in that data centre would be moved to the Sydney data centre, which has the most up to date infrastructure, as well as capacity to expand.

- They plan to 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 use the Cloud Infrastructure to increase flexibility and availability for some of the LoB (Line of Business) applications that will continue to run on their own internal infrastructure. However, they are hoping to take advantage of the Cloud infrastructure to help manage and balance demand on internal resource use.

The Board of MetaSoft is contemplating this strategy as a way to increase the company's flexibility and responsiveness, particularly for its overseas operations. The Board also expects to achieve significant savings on the cost of maintaining their ICT infrastructure by closing the oldest existing data centre. This would entail retiring the infrastructure in that data centre rather than having to update it.

MetaSoft has again approached you to advise them on this strategy. You have already advised MetaSoft that this strategic approach will mean that they will need to design and operate a "Hybrid Cloud" methodology, where part of their data centre is "on premise" and another part in a Cloud.

MetaSoft 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. Your team 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:
o A total of 20% of the total marks for this assignment are for individual contributions to the team task;
o 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:
The team's task is to prepare a report for MetaSoft that discusses the following:

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

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

2. 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 MetaSoft'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 MetaSoft 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 MetaSoft board has decided, as an initial step, to move their SharePoint instance and their SQL Server 2012 Database servers to the AWS cloud in order to begin the migration process, and test their strategy.

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

2. 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.