Question

Case Study:

Regional Gardens Case study Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a few related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection several 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. Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data centre at its main site in Bathurst where the company’s servers and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure: • 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 140GB HDD); • 3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array); • 1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array); • 4 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1 array); • 2 x Windows Server 2008 R2 running Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array); • 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD). This infrastructure has not been updated for some time and the Regional Gardens Board is concerned that a full upgrade may now cost them more than it is worth. The Board is now considering moving some, or all, of their current infrastructure into the Cloud. The Board sees this as a strategic move to future-proof the company and is looking to a move to the cloud to ensure that its services are: • Readily available and always accessible, • Capable of handling heavy loads in times of peak demand, • Capable of serving downloads to users as required, • Secure from attacks, • Capable of providing detailed reports on usage. Regional Gardens is considering the following strategic proposal: • They plan to retain their data centre solely for archival and long-term data storage. This would entail updating their data storage infrastructure in the Bathurst Data Centre 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. Their web services are running on the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers using Apache Tomcat • They plan to change 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). All Microservices are to be designed so that they can be easily moved from one cloud to another to suit requirements or to take advantage of price differentials. • They also plan to migrate their Garden Design LoB (Line of Business) applications to the cloud in order to increase the application's flexibility and availability. The Garden Design LoB application suite will require: o several IaaS instances running Windows Server 2019 o several PaaS instances for Microsoft SharePoint 2019 Enterprise • Regional Gardens would like to keep their gardening data sets in Australia. The Regional Gardens Board is contemplating this strategy to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness. The Board also expects to achieve significant savings by migrating to a Cloud based ICT infrastructure. They appreciate that this would entail retraining for: • Their existing ICT staff so that they can manage the new Cloud based infrastructure, • Their development staff so that they can start to develop using a Microservices model. Regional Gardens have some 70 garden design, horticultural and support staff that work on different projects for clients in New South Wales. The Board has been looking at the steady increase in workload in garden design and consulting and want to expand this business unit into an Australiawide enterprise. They have been advised that a move to using a Cloud based infrastructure would be an advantage to them. Currently the designers use a locally installed Dynascape software suite on each of their PCs (the Dynascape system requirements are an i7 processor, a minimum of 4GB RAM and a minimum 2GB HDDR6 video card) on each PC. But Dynascape now offers it’s software on an SaaS basis (see https://www.dynascape.com/ and https://www.capterra.com.au/software/5930/dynascape#about). The Board is particularly concerned about the security of their garden design process and their intellectual property for garden design. They are also concerned to keep their client data secure. Accordingly, they are looking for a solution that keeps their design and client data on the company’s own servers in its Bathurst data centre.

You must read the Regional Gardens Case Study in Interact before attempting this assignment

The Regional Gardens Board is considering the following strategic proposal:

• They plan to retain their data centre solely for archival and long-term data storage. This would entail updating their data storage infrastructure, and moving all other infrastructure into the Cloud.
• They plan to implement a multi-cloud strategy to prevent vendor lock-in and provide the ability to take advantage of price differentials.
• They have now moved all their existing Web Services to a IaaS instance in the Cloud that has been designed to provide HA (High Availability) and a better degree of flexibility in supplying data to their customers and employees. This IaaS instance uses a number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers using Apache Tomcat.
• They plan to change 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). All Microservices are to be designed so that they can be easily moved from one cloud to another to suit their changing requirements.
• They also plan to migrate their Garden Design LoB (Line of Business) applications to the cloud in order to increase the application's flexibility and availability. The Garden Design LoB application suite will require:
  • A number of IaaS instances running Windows Server 2019
  • A number of PaaS instances for Microsoft SharePoint 2019 Enterprise
• Regional Gardens would like to keep their gardening data sets in Australia.

The Regional Gardens Board is contemplating this strategy as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness. The Board also expects to achieve significant savings by migrating to a Cloud based ICT infrastructure. They appreciate that this would entail retraining for:

• Their existing ICT staff so that they can manage the new Cloud based infrastructure,
• Their development staff so that they can start to develop using a Microservices model.

Regional Gardens has again approached you to advise them on this strategy. The Board is also concerned about how this strategy will affect their BCP (Business Continuity Plan) and their backup and disaster recovery strategies.

1. Describe the Cloud architectures you would employ to assist Regional Gardens to meet the Board’s cloud strategy?
   1. Should Regional Gardens adopt a hybrid Cloud approach, particularly for its data sets? What are the benefits and issues that would arise from this approach?
   2. Describe each of the architectures that you would use to meet the Board’s hybrid cloud strategy, along with your reasons for deploying them.
   3. Describe the benefits, critical points and issues that would be the likely result of the deployment of these architectures.

Answer 1

Should Regional Gardens adopt a hybrid Cloud approach, particularly for its data sets? What are the benefits and issues that would arise from this approach? (10 marks)

A hybrid cloud system is always preffered to implement. It has the benefits of both public and private. There might be datas which the company should protect and keep inside the company only. Such datas and portals can be made to private cloud system so that the autherized ones only can view and make use. The other non priority stuffs can make public so that every one could have access. This will cut the cost of making every thing public.

But, when it is a hybrid cloud system, they must understand the security risks and all. They must care there is a public opening and any one can access the system. Also there may be chance for intrusion trials through the public system to the private system.

Benefits:

• Datas are protected and backuped
• Any time any where access
• Private file access only to autherized ones.

Cons:

• Security challenges
• Data managing risk between private and public

Describe each of the architectures that you would use to meet the Board’s hybrid cloud strategy, along with your reasons for deploying them. (15 marks)

Based on Regional Gardens requirement, the cloud service model is selected. Regional Gardens can implement cloud computing in two ways. Firstly, it can adopt a private cloud hosted on premises or in an external environment by a third party provider. In this case, implementing a hybrid cloud will benefit the company by reducing the IT infrastructure maintenance costs. To be more precise, Regional Gardens can internally (on-premises) host the sensitive applications and move the less sensitive applications onto the externally hosted cloud environment . In this context,Regional Gardens can choose amongst the three most common types of cloud architecture or cloud delivery models such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). The selection of the most appropriate cloud architecture should essentially be based on the three major factors that determine the level of business benefits. Firstly, flexibility in terms of costs is an important factor. Secondly, scalability is another crucial aspect of deploying cloud models. Finally, security of the organization’s critical data is another important factor to consider.

Description and justifications of cloud architectures deployment
Hybrid cloud:Hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. More specifically, hybrid clouds typically consist of one private or virtual private cloud and one or more public clouds. For example, Regional Gardens can use a private cloud to keep its sensitive data in a secured environment while interacting with its customer using a public cloud (Li et al. 2013). Hybrid cloud deployment will essentially allow Regional Gardens to migrate certain applications and information onto the cloud utilize the cloud-based datacenter capacity, create effective backup and disaster recovery strategies. It also helps to utilize new cloud native capabilities, bring certain applications closer to their customers and at the same time, ensure cost effectiveness and high availability. Deploying a hybrid cloud architecture will be helpful for Regional Gardens because it will eliminate the need of high investments in on-premises hardware and software.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS facilitates application development over the internet. The PaaS cloud architecture is typically accessed through a web browser. PaaS supports an entire web application development life cycle, along with all the individual phases of software development such as design, building, testing, deploying, managing and updating. PaaS eliminates the need for hardware investments. Regional Gardens can utilize a PaaS architecture for its software development work. The PaaS features such as the add-on development facilities, application delivery-only environments, stand-alone development environment, and remote utilization of development platform are beneficial for Regional Gardens. The company employees can use the user customization facilities for developing, designing and implementing their web apps on the same platform where the end-users can also run the apps .

Describe the benefits, critical points and issues that would be the likely result of the deployment of these architectures. (15 marks)

Hybrid-cloud architecture benefits and issues:
Benefits: It provides maximized efficiency and flexibility as well as optimized workload. It allows for adequate scalability by placing some workload onto the public cloud such as backend processes and application development, which require a good amount of storage and computing power. Other less sensitive applications or workload, requiring lower latency and greater security are suited to a virtual private cloud (Armbrust et al. 2010). Thus, it is beneficial in terms of scalability, availability and billing optimization.

Issues: Compatibility between the on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based infrastructure can be a real issue. In addition, maintaining proper integration between the data and application can be another issue. The infrastructure where each application and data is placed needs to be synchronized so that it is possible to access correct data remotely. Lastly, networking is another factor while deploying a hybrid cloud. It is significantly critical to maintain adequate connectivity and communication between the public cloud and the private or virtual private cloud through networking and synchronized data transfer processes (Luo et al. 2011). It can become potentially complex to address this issue in the hybrid cloud architecture.

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