A Business has a Multi-million-pound Turnover in the Past Three Years: IT Assignment, NUS, Singapore

Task:

You are required to investigate both advantages and disadvantages of moving to cloud computing, based on a given company scenario, and then represent your research outcome to the company management team. In addition, you are also required to generate an action plan to address the company’s needs.

Scenario:

A business has a multi-million-pound turnover in the past three years, and it has undergone a massive shift from sales in-person to their new e-commerce system bringing it from single-digit percentages in terms of sales to representing a third to a half of all of their sales. This business has two sites, their main HQ (350 users) with a leased line connection and their secondary site (100 users) on a basic ADSL service. All services, including those external-facing services, are hosted in the main HQ and the secondary site accesses any internal-only services via a VPN.

Unfortunately, the company has just suffered a serious outage in its IT systems due to a single device failure. However, the increased usage and popularity of their e-commerce systems have not seen a similar investment and interest in their IT teams, which have been forced to continue with low numbers of staff and very tight budgets. As a consequence, such a single device failed, however, it was such a critical piece of the puzzle it took many services down, including preventing online sales from happening, costing the business almost an entire weekend of sales.

Having realized investing in IT is required, senior management has asked that the IT department create a proposal for the modernization and overhaul of the existing IT services to build in better resilience and scalability for the services which are required for the business. The principal aim of the changes to the IT estate is to attempt to minimize the risks of a repeat event. The senior management team is keen to react quickly to correct the faults with their systems, so implementation speed should be considered a priority where it doesn’t bring significant downsides to ongoing operations and maintenance.

The services identified as needing to meet the new “modernization” requirements include:

• Key infrastructure services (DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, etc.)
• File shares between two sites
• Several intranet applications, such as the CRM system
• Email system
• Database servers
• Public-facing websites and web applications
• FTP Server for exchanging large files
• Backup solutions

In addition, the secondary site constantly has issues accessing both internal IT services and the internet which the modernization should also address.

The senior management team also identified that the new modernisation will benefit from cloud computing technologies, such as:

• Cloud Identity Management and Device Management (e.g. Azure Active
• Directory)
• Cloud Email Hosting and Solutions
• Cloud Website and Web application hosting
• Cloud Database Solution
• Cloud-Based File Sharing and Hosting
• Cloud Backup Solutions

However, due to misunderstanding the concepts of cloud computing technologies, the senior management team are afraid to move their key services to the cloud

Assume that the senior management team has agreed to move some of their existing services to the cloud. You are now required to work individually to write a report covering the following topics:

• Evaluate and suggest an action plan which can address the needs of the scenario to provide a more resilient, reliable, and scalable provision of IT services. Particularly considering:
  1. House vs cloud options
  2. Implementation time and difficulty
  3. Both initial and ongoing costs
  4. Ongoing maintenance
• A document showing the steps to setup and configuration of one of the suggested or existing services. It should show what you have done to meet
  1. Professional best practice
  2. Performance and Scalability
  3. Resilience, reliability, and security

The report should include suggestions for how you could make existing services both more resilient both from single device failure and other reasonable causes of outages and more scalable and extendible to meet what has been a very steady and consistent rise in demand for their services.