CT097-3-3-CSVC Cloud Infrastructure and Services

Assignment Question

Background

Amoria Bond, a multinational recruitment and executive search services firm, provides specialist
and personalized recruitment services to a number of impressive private sector clients. Clients
include household names, multinational retailers, and SAP. The company is listed in the
Recruiter FAST 50 list as a result of their rapid expansion. The company now employs around
90 members of staff spread across multiple offices, including Manchester (Head Office),
London, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Singapore.

The company went through a number of phases with their IT infrastructure, thanks to their
incredibly impressive growth. Following multiple upgrades and server rollouts, the
infrastructure includes File Servers, Terminal Servers1, an Exchange Server, and a Database
Server. Applications used are office suite, generic day-to-day office applications, and their
recruitment database.

Currently there is too much strain placed upon the Manchester connections, and the existing
infrastructure offered little in terms of office survivability, resilience, or redundancy. At this point
the company engaged you to provide a solution. After a detailed discussion with the business,
including the management team, and the users, you have identified four areas of concern that
are of key importance for the company:
1. Resilience, Redundancy, and Availability
Given that the company works in the fast-paced recruitment sector, they need an IT platform
that is resilient against hardware failure, and highly available to ensure maximum productivity
and profitability. Data redundancy was of utmost importance as the company relies heavily upon
their recruitment data to make their tight deadlines.
2. Security, Backup, and Disaster Recovery Planning
Amoria Bond’s database is the company’s lifeblood and incredibly valuable to them, but also to
their competitors. Industrial espionage is a real concern and therefore they needed a solution
that would be very well protected both physically and virtually. In addition to this, the solution
needed to account for a disaster recovery plan if the data was to become corrupt or sabotaged.
3. Connectivity and Bandwidth
The existing offices were already straining the connections into the Manchester Head Office;
with two new offices on the cards, a solution which would remove that strain was needed.
4. Scalability, including Hardware & Software Upgrades
Thanks to their substantial growth, they had already been through a number of hardware and
software upgrades. A traditional IT proposal which allows the company for additional growth
came in at £120k over three years and requires substantial upfront investment. The company
wants a solution that would scale with their business without the need for future-proofing their
hardware and software purchases upfront.

At 60 users, and two new offices on the cards, your decision was to move the company’s
application and data on the cloud.

*A terminal server is a server or network device that enables connections to multiple client systems to connect to
a LAN network without using a modem or a network interface.
General Assumptions/Plans

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CT097-3-3-CSVC Cloud Infrastructure and Services

 As a result of hosting the IT platform in the Cloud, users at all offices would now connect to
the cloud platform via their own office’s connections.
 The new design should benefit from the current technologies. All necessary hardware and
software should be addressed.
 A RAID configuration is used for the data storage in Cloud’s Storage Area Network (SAN),
ensuring a high level of data resilience and an efficient read/write speed.
 Security for the connections and the applications must be in place.
Deliverables
Executive Summary (Group Work)
General Assumptions (Group Work)
Physical Architecture (Group Member 1)
 Introduction/Background
 Available Infrastructure (compute, storage, network)
 Hardware and Software Requirements (compute, storage, network)
 Suggested Network Communication models
 Network Design and Topology
Virtualization
 Compute virtualization techniques, methods and resources (Group Member 1)
 Storage virtualization techniques, methods and resources (Group Member 2)
 Network virtualization techniques, methods and resources (Group Member 3)
Cloud Migration (Group Member 2)
 Introduction/Background
 Proposed Cloud Deployment Model
o Justification and Advantages
o Limitations
 Proposed Cloud Service Model
o Justification and Advantages
o Limitations
 Proposed Cloud-based Architecture
Security Solutions (Group Member 3)
 Introduction/Background
 Security Concerns/Threats and Solutions (min. 3)
o Security Threat 1
o Security Threat 2
o Security Threat 3
 Proposed Security Model (how this solution address the above-mentioned threats)
Cost Benefits Analysis
 Total Cost of physical and virtual layer setup (Group Member 1)
 Total Cost of using cloud services (Group Member 2)
 Total Cost for security solutions (Group Member 3)
 Return on Investment (ROI) (Group Work)
Conclusion (Group Work)
Appendices
 Workload Matrix
 Any other relevant information
Note:
Use appropriate diagrams wherever possible to illustrate your proposals.
Important:

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CT097-3-3-CSVC Cloud Infrastructure and Services

This is a team effort. All members must be fully informed about and involved in all
aspects of the project plans. Individual members will be responsible for researching and
documenting certain discrete portions of the project. All findings must be shared and
discussed and work on the project should be done on a collaborative basis.

Assignment Requirements

1. You are required to work in a group of 3 members.

2. Your report must be typed using Microsoft Word with Times New Roman font size 12.
Expected length is from 6000 to 8000 words. You need to include a word count at the end
of the report. Report should be in 1.5 spacing.

3. You are required to prepare PowerPoint presentation, print out 6 slides in a page and attach
it in the appendices section. Include the softcopy of the presentation slides together with the
assignment.

4. As part of project management, you are required to develop a Gantt chart (project plan) that
indicates clearly the activities required in order for the project to be a success.

5. The report has to be well presented and should be typed. Submission of reports that are
unprofessional in its outlook will not fare well when marks are allocated.

6. Your report must combine all the deliverables in one coherent document.

7. Ensure that the report is printed on standard A4 (210 X 297 mm) sized paper. Paper weight
of 80 grams and above is highly recommended.

8. The report should have a one (1”) margin all around the page as illustrated below:

1 inch 1 inch
1 inch

1 inch

The Typed Text

1 inch

1 inch

1 inch 1 inch

9. The assignment should attach front cover, detailed workload matrix, table of contents and
marking scheme. A transparent plastic sheet can be placed in front of the report to protect
the front cover.

10. Plagiarism is a serious offence and will automatically be awarded zero (0) mark.

11. All information, figures and diagrams obtained from external sources must be referenced
using the Harvard referencing system accordingly.

*IMPORTANT*
You have to hand in your assignment (hardcopy & softcopy) on time with the Coursework
Submission and Feedback Form.
Marking Scheme (you need to copy this table into your document)

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CT097-3-3-CSVC Cloud Infrastructure and Services

Student’s Name Student 1 Student 2 Student 3

Group Components (A)

Overall design & structure (10)
Current trends & best practices(10)
Executive summary (5)
Coherence & integration (5)
Total Marks (30)

Individual Components (B)

Technical accuracy (15)
Critical analysis &
justification(20)
Research & completeness (15)
Referencing & original work (10)
Presentation (10)
Total Marks (70)

Student 1 Student 2 Student 3

Group Components (A)

Individual Components (B)

Overall Marks (A + B)

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