Task SoftArc Engineering Ltd is a civil engineering company which works across Australia as well as in Indonesia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea. The company is considering moving some of its computer infrastructure into the Cloud. The SoftArc Engineering Board is contemplating this move as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness, as well as to achieve some savings on the cost of maintaining their ICT infrastructure. SoftArc Engineering has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud Computing in their daily operations. They have some 200 engineering and support staff that work on different civil engineering projects in different parts of the Australia and neighbouring countries. They have been advised that a move to using a Cloud based infrastructure would be an advantage to them. Your task is to: 1. Prepare a PowerPoint briefing for the SoftArc Engineering board. Your briefing should: 1. Explain the main concepts of Cloud Computing and why you think that a move to the Cloud could be good for SoftArc Engineering; 2. Explain some of the Cloud Architectures that you think would be useful for SoftArc Engineering to use as part of their Cloud infrastructure. 3. Each slide in the briefing must also include speaking notes in the notes section to explain the slide, and all images used in the briefing should be referenced. (20 marks) 2. One of SoftArc Engineering’s first undertakings is to provide all their civil engineering staff with the ability to access office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files, whether they are in the office, at home, or deployed on site in the field. The SoftArc Engineering board is very concerned to learn about the critical issues, other than cost, that may affect the supply of Cloud based office automation to their staff. You will need to prepare a report on the best way to provide office automation for SoftArc Engineering. Your report should: 1. Provide SoftArc Engineering with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their civil engineering staff; 2. Outline the major benefits and issues for each approach; 3. Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose. This part of your report should be no longer than 2 pages. (20 marks) 3. SoftArc Engineering has a number of data centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. These data centres are linked by a fibre based WAN and data is replicated between the data centres daily. The 3 data centres each run x86 based servers attached to a HPE 3PAR SAN with 1PB of storage. They also have a series of RHEL 6 servers (Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.0) that are used to host Web pages and various Web services. These are located only in the Sydney data centre. SoftArc Engineering is considering initially moving its Web infrastructure to an IaaS instance in a public Cloud, but they are unsure of the issues that are involved with this migration. You are to write a report for the SoftArc Engineering board that: 1. Describes the difference between locally hosted infrastructure (ie. in an enterprise data centre) and infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider in a public Cloud. 2. You will need to discuss the critical issues and factors, other than cost, that SoftArc Engineering will have to consider in choosing to migrate their Web infrastructure to an IaaS service provider. This part of your report should take no more than two pages. (30 marks) 4. SoftArc Engineering is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. SoftArc Engineering has deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2013 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its 250 employees. The SharePoint 2013 instance has been extensively customised to suit SoftArc Engineering’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 Engineering would like to move its SharePoint 2013 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users in remote or overseas locations. SoftArc Engineering want you to report on: 1. What are the major differences between the models IaaS, PaaS and SaaS? (5 marks) 2. Recommend the model that you consider most appropriate for this service and discuss why this model is the most appropriate for the SharePoint service. (10 marks) 3. What are the most likely problems that SoftArc Engineering will encounter with the model that you recommend? How would you advise SoftArc Engineering to deal with these issues? (15 marks) 4. This part of your report should be no more than 3 pages. Presentation Your report MUST be presented in MS Word format. Your report should: • Use Calibri, or a similar font, in 11 or 12 point type. • All diagrams and images are to be embedded in the document. Diagrams and images that are suppliued separately will not be marked. • All text should be left-justified. • Each page must have a header or footer with your name and student number. • Page numbers must be shown in the footer of each page, except on the title page. Reports are marked and feedback attached using a MS Word based tool. Reports that are submitted in PDF format will be re-formatted to Word format in order to be marked. Allowances will not be made for any loss of information, diagrams or images as a result of the re-formatting. Task 2 SoftArc Engineering Ltd is a civil engineering company which works across Australia as well as in Indonesia, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea. The company is considering the following strategic proposal: • They plan to close down the Brisbane 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. • 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 SoftArc Engineering is contemplating this strategy as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness, particularly for its remote area and 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. SoftArc Engineering has again approached you to advise them on this strategy. You have already advised SoftArc Engineering 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. SoftArc Engineering 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. Your task is to prepare a report for SoftArc Engineering that discusses the following: 1. Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist SoftArc Engineering meet the Board’s strategy? 1. Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it. (10 marks) 2. Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures. (10 marks) 2. Describe the risks that you see associated with this new Hybrid Cloud strategy. You should name and describe each risk that you identify, and then describe a possible control for the risk. This may be presented in a tabular form. (20 marks) 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. (20 marks) 4. Discuss briefly what you would recommend should be included in SoftArc Engineering’s BCP as a result of their adoption of a Hybrid Cloud 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. (10 marks) 5. Discuss the requirements that SoftArc Engineering will need to consider in order to conduct remote server administration, resource management and SLA management for it’s 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. (10 marks) 6. The SoftArc Engineering 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. (10 marks) 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. (10 marks) Your report MUST be presented in MS Word format. Your report should: Use Calibri, or a similar font, in 11 or 12 point type. • All diagrams and images are to be embedded in the document. Diagrams and images that are suppliued separately will not be marked. • All text should be left-justified. • Each page must have a header or footer with your name and student number. Page numbers must be shown in the footer of each page, except on the title page. Reports are marked and feedback attached using a MS Word based tool. Reports that are submitted in PDF format will be re-formatted to Word format in order to be marked. Allowances will not be made for any loss of information, diagrams or images as a result of the re-formatting.