Security Management and Migration Assignment for Cloud Data Storage

Question

Task: 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.

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.

The task
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?
   Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it.
   Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures.
2. 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 Micro services approach. You will need to consider, as a minimum, the issues of application resilience, backup and disaster recovery in a Hybrid Cloud environment.

Answer

1. Choice of cloud architecture for Hybrid Cloud and the causes for the deployment
There are several effective and important cloud architectures, which would be beneficial for the business firm of Regional Gardens Ltd. Three most essential kinds of cloud architectures are Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS)(Botta et al., 2016). In this context, the organizations need to choose effective cloud architecture that is appropriate for the approach related to hybrid cloud. Based on the requirement of Regional Gardens Ltd., Platform as a Service (PaaS) is efficient for hybrid cloud for this particular company (Hashem et al., 2015).

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is regarded as platform based group related to several cloud computing service. The major responsibility of PaaS is to deliver platform and enable the customers of clients for enhancing, running and managing entire applications without any difficulty to maintain simple infrastructure related to the improvement and introduction of application(Botta et al., 2016). The foremost example of PaaS is Amazon Web Service (AWS) Therefore, this specific organization should select PaaS to attain better cloud computing services and maintaining the applications in an effective manner (Jo et al., 2015). It will be very helpful according to requirement of database server for Regional Gardens.

2. Advantages and disadvantages for the deployment of chosen cloud architectures
In the following section, the discussion is about the risks as well as benefits of chosen cloud architectures.

Benefits or advantages:
Several benefits for deploying the PaaS or Platform as a Service within the firm of Regional Gardens Ltd. Prime benefits of chosen cloud architecture are specified below:

Minimization of difficulties and raise of alertness:
One of the major advantage is it supports in reducing the difficulties to a large extent and it also facilitates in increasing agility.

Reforming Application Management:
The second essential benefits of hybrid approach of PaaS are effective reforming of application management. For any reforming of application is compulsory therefore, the organization should be pay attention on the reformation of application management.

Cost-efficient:
It is cost-efficient, which is beneficial for the organization to use it easily as per the requirement.

Faster in nature:
The model of Platform as a Service is really faster in nature. All applications provided by the model are functioning properly. It is quite simple to use and the application procedure is also simple (Sanaei et al., 2014). It also facilitates in checking entire management as well as scaling.

Risks or disadvantages:
The major risks associated with the preferred cloud architecture are discussed below:

Lack of proper SSDLC:
One of the prime risks associated with the model of PaaS is it cannot encompass of SSDLC or Secure Software Development Process of Life Cycle.

Inadequate requirements in SLA:
Lack of enough requirements in SLA is another risk of Platform as a Service model. This is the main distress for the organization, which use cloud. Therefore, the company could face problem in the process.

BCP and DR:
Another important risks or disadvantage of hybrid PaaS is the effective business planning along with the potential ways to recover the disaster. In this context, the vendor of this organization faced these risks during application of model of Platform as a Service (Botta et al., 2016).

References
Botta, A., De Donato, W., Persico, V., &Pescapé, A. (2016). Integration of cloud computing and internet of things: a survey. Future Generation Computer Systems, 56, 684-700.

Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information Systems, 47, 98-115.

Jo, M., Maksymyuk, T., Strykhalyuk, B., & Cho, C. H. (2015). Device-to-device-based heterogeneous radio access network architecture for mobile cloud computing. IEEE Wireless Communications, 22(3), 50-58.

Sanaei, Z., Abolfazli, S., Gani, A., &Buyya, R. (2014). Heterogeneity in mobile cloud computing: taxonomy and open challenges. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 16(1), 369-392.