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.

Tasks
You have been engaged to provide a report for Regional Gardens in their planned move to a Cloud and Microservices strategy.

Your task is to prepare a report for Regional Gardens that discusses the following:

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? (10 marks)
   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. (15 marks)
   3. Describe the benefits, critical points and issues that would be the likely result of the deployment of these architectures. (15 marks)
2. Describe the major Information Security risks that you see associated with the move to this Microservices strategy for Web Services. You should name and describe each risk that you identify, estimate its likelihood and consequence and then describe a possible control for the risk. This should be presented in a tabular form. (20 marks)
3. Discuss what you would recommend should be included in Regional Gardens’ BCP as a result of their adoption of a Cloud and Microservices approach. You will need to consider, as a minimum, the issues of application resilience, backup and disaster recovery in a Hybrid Cloud environment. (40 marks)

You are to provide a written report with the following headings:

• Proposed Architectures for a Cloud approach
• Threat and Risk Assessment report for Cloud and Microservices
• BCP changes to meet a Cloud and Microservices approach

As a rough guide, the report should not be longer than about 5,000 words.