Question

The Challenge

VC, Inc. is an entertainment company that specializes in and provides streaming media and video-on-demand online. It is headquartered in Manhattan, New York.

Their on-line application that allows its customers to access video content is currently running on their data center and comprises of the following tiers: a Microsoft SQL Server Database, a Web Front-End on a Windows Server with IIS, and a File System-based content store for image and video files.

In addition, the company uses internally various legacy systems for accounting, reporting, human resource management, etc.

VC is about to kick off a large marketing campaign and is expecting significant and rapid growth. Its client base will increase exponentially and the need for personnel will increase rapidly as well. They have engaged you, the Cloud Solutions Architect, to design the future state of their systems and help with meeting the following five tives:

Objective 1 (20%): Migrate the client internet application to a cost-effective, secure, scalable, and redundant infrastructure on the cloud that will scale the application on demand, distribute load efficiently, and serve large media files without latency. VC, Inc.'s management needs to be able to expand the infrastructure geographically and reach to regions that currently the service is not available but that should happen based on a plan and in coordination with marketing efforts that target certain geographic regions.

Objective 2 (20%): Prevent business disruption due to potential disasters. VC Inc. doesn’t currently have a Disaster Recovery (DR) site. Your DR solutions needs to be designed to include protection of data, images, and videos from natural or other disasters.

Objective 3 (20%): Explain how your proposed infrastructure will protect VC Inc's data at rest and data in transit. For example, the user database stores sensitive information (like username, password, privacy settings, SSN's and Credit Card numbers). How is this data going to be protected?

Objective 4 (20%): Connect the AWS infrastructure to their existing data center (on-prem
At this point, the company’s Chief Technology Officer prefers that the Accounting, Reporting, and Human Resource Systems stay on-premises but they will need to interact with the production SQL Server database the client-facing application uses. Also, for security purposes, the Security and Compliance Officer has decided that the company’s corporate Active Directory will remain in premises.

Objective 5 (20%): Safeguard against attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Explain what AWS Services you will deploy to mitigate the risk of DDoS and minimize impact.

Answer 1

The basic objective of Cloud technology to is make resources(hardware/software) available using internet to various organizations/clients.So cloud providing vendors provide their IT infrastructure(computer servers/memory/storage and so on) to store client's/organization's data using internet.

Objective 1

In, the beginning , company(VC, Inc.) should go for cloud to have more resources, because on cloud, according to the demand more resources are allocated to satisfy the need,company(VC, Inc.) should contact to the global leaders(providing the cloud solution) to cover certain geographic regions.
cloud solution providers can provide IT infrastructure to meet out the demand.
apart from all that, there is a pressing need to increase the number of customers in those regions.
Hence, an effective marketing strategy is required to increase the number of customers.the two tasks will be performed concurrently
1. Increase the number of customers
2 increase the demand of resources, these demands are supposed to be meet out by the cloud vendor.

Objective 2
If data is on cloud,then protection from disasters is the responsibility of vendor(that's why cloud vendor should be a global leader in the field of providing cloud solutions.).

Apart from all that there are also some global leader in the field of data backup and recovery.
company(VC, Inc.) can also contact such global leaders.

but company(VC, Inc.) will pay to cloud vendor and backup/recovery vendor.
that's why there is a need to perform two tasks concurrently as mentioned above.
In short, earn profits and then invest on business . But there should be minimum gap between earning and investment on business to provide the smooth and improved services to customers.

Objective 3:-
from business point of view, goodwill of the company(VC, Inc.) is very important.so the security of customer's confidential information is a serious issue.company(VC, Inc.) should be ready to implement at least two security policies
1.)Use of encryption to secure data/information.
2.)Educate customer about security,such as do not store credit/debit card detail on web site, delete such information after the use,change passwords frequently,choose strong passwords and so on.

Objective 4:-

There is no need to put all the data on cloud. As mentioned in the given scenario, some data should be owned,governed,and managed by the company(VC, Inc.)itself. there is a valid reason for this.
if customer confidential information is important for the company(VC, Inc.).
if company's assets such as images/videos/audio are important.
then Accounting, Reporting, and Human Resource Systems and company’s corporate Active Directory, all are important for business analysis, resource utilization, business process re engineering and so on to ensure the growth and smooth functioning of the company(company’s corporate Active Directory ).

Objective 5 :-

XWS Shield is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that protects applications running on XWS. XWS Shield minimizes application downtime and latency,There are two tiers of XWS Shield - Standard and Advanced.

In the beginnig, Company should contact to cloud vendors.
but if company grows, and achieve a good CMM(Capability Maturity Model) Level.

There are some issues that should be taken under consideration.
Company(VC, Inc.) should consider following issues.
there are some implication such as
is it a better choice to hand over organization's data to cloud vendors?
is it a good choice for organizations to be dependent on cloud providing vendors?
What if a cloud providing vendor shuts down its business?

there are much more issued in this regard.

Consider a clould providing vendor, this vendor is supposed to provide data/services to the organizations
but how this vendor will make sure that all the services/data provided by this vendor will be intact and on time.will this vendor look for another cloud providing vendor?

Can an organization be relaxed completely about data/services availability/integrity/confidentiality after providing its data to cloud providing vendors.

Computing Capability:-

Most of the vendors are claiming that they are having infinite computing power, and the vendor can meet out the increased demand of the customers instantly,but it is very hard to believe that because cloud providing vendors can not achieve infinite computing power, if vendors have finite financial budget.

Communication Speed:-

if an organization(handed over its data to cloud providing vendor) experiences low communication speed,this organization can lodge the complaint to the vendor in this regard, and vendor may come up with a reason
"SLOW INTERNET SPEED", then how the organization will come to know the reality,means it(slow communication speed) is due to "SLOW INTERNET SPEED" or it is due to vendor's poor infrastructure(Servers/RAM/Secondary Storage).

In future,organizations(with large amount of data) will be required to develop their own system to take care of their important data without depending on cloud vendors.
Trust:-

when an organization hand overs its data to the cloud providing vendor. the availability/ confidentiality/ integrity of data heavily depends on cloud providing vendor.
In this modern era of technology, where several technologies(digital signature, cryptography, biometric authentication techniques) are being are used for security, because no body wants to trust.
but in case of Cloud Computing we trust on cloud providing vendors.