Scenario: You are an IT analyst employed with Cloud Connections, Inc. Cloud Conn

Question

Scenario:

You are an IT analyst employed with Cloud Connections, Inc. Cloud Connections is a cloud computing company offering PaaS, Iaas, and Saas solutions to clients. You have been assigned to work with Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC, a large medical consortium that includes:

Grayson Hospital, located in Grayson, Massachusetts

Grayson Healthcare Partners satellite medical offices located in California and Florida

Recently acquired Smith & Jones Hospital in Missouri

Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC currently has a company-owned data center in Tempe, AZ, that acts as the primary data center. They also have a company-owned hot site secondary data center in California.

Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC offshores support of its systems to third party vendor Kapoor Technologies, Inc. based in Mumbai, India. Employees at Kapoor Technologies, Inc., have access to personal health information (PHI).

Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC also has contracts with government agencies in Missouri and California.

Issues:

A recent capacity planning review shows that servers are reaching their end of life, and if they are replaced, they will need more storage to handle the increased data load.

Data centers in AZ and MO are consuming too much energy and will need to be modified to be more energy efficient.

Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC has multiple restrictions and regulations because of the data they store/process, and because of their areas of operation.

PHI is an attractive target for cybercriminals.

Goals:

Increase efficiency and lower costs.

Adhere to applicable laws wherever data is stored and processed.

Provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data.

Consolidate data from all sources.

Reduce hardware cost.

Project Proposal:

Grayson Healthcare Partners LLC has reached out to Cloud Connections, Inc. to explore cloud computing as a solution to address their issues and goals. As the IT analyst assigned to this client, you are expected to present a project proposal to address the potential client's needs.

Explanation / Answer

Q1) As the IT analyst assigned to this client, you are expected to present a project proposal to address the potential client's needs

Cost Effectiveness: - An extremely flexible pricing structure is one of the top benefits of the public cloud. Most of the public cloud providers give businesses the flexibility to pay by the hour. It helps businesses, especially the small and medium size, to tightly control their costs by paying for the infrastructure only based on their needs. Businesses can run their web applications without committing to a fixed cost for servers, software, setup or maintenance.

Quick and Easy Set Up: - Businesses can set up their public cloud within a matter of few hours. It can be easily bought on the Internet and deployed and configured remotely through the cloud provider website. Your IT team can very easily configure and manage the set up remotely with just an internet connection.

Optimization of Staffing Budgets: - In many cases, the staffing budget makes up for more than half of the total computing costs – simply because good IT engineers are difficult to find and are expensive. With public cloud, companies need to budget only for the cloud services and since the management of cloud is extremely easy, they can always restructure their IT Teams and use the skillful resources in the areas that make more money for the business.

No Maintenance: - The cloud provider is responsible for the maintenance of the hardware, software, and networks in the cloud. Businesses, therefore, do not need to worry about keeping their infrastructure up-to-date or worry about aspects like security and upgrades. It allows them to run the infrastructure with a minimal IT staff, thereby significantly reducing the overall costs.

No Long-Term Contracts:- Small and medium businesses typically do not want to get into long term contracts and commit to a certain storage or bandwidth capacity because, a lot of times, they are not really sure about the real requirements. In such situations, the public cloud hosting works out very well because it does not require a long-term commitment or investment. The cloud providers usually offer pay-as-you-grow models, which make the overall engagement extremely easy and hassle-free.

Economies of Scale:- The public cloud offers massive economies of scale. It is extremely difficult to match it with private data centers. Businesses can be assured that the infrastructure is optimally used and the inevitable peaks and drops in the workloads are well taken care of. Since the infrastructure costs are shared across multiple users, the cloud providers typically optimize the hardware needs of its data centers and offer the services at lower costs.

Agility:- Today, businesses need to be quicker and more dynamic to be productive. They need to continuously evolve and improve their processes, tools, technologies, and policies. Being agile enables businesses to take quicker decisions and appropriately prioritize the work and ensure customer satisfaction. With public cloud, businesses experience simplified internal operations, better delivery, better collaboration, faster rollouts of new business initiatives, and improved data gathering and analysis ability.

Global in Minutes: - Be it the startups in India or online banks in New Zealand, several businesses which want to provide 24/7 access to their systems to their customers or employees are adopting the public cloud. Public cloud providers, with their massive networks of servers, network bandwidth, and the IT resources, are making the robust computing environment available and accessible for SMEs worldwide. In situations when a certain sensitive data needs to reside inside the boundaries of a particular nation, the public cloud makes it quick and easy to simply select the data center from that nation. The cloud providers have data centers across the world and businesses can select the one according to their business needs.

High Flexibility without Redundancy: - Before the era of cloud, businesses needed to buy additional hardware, storage, and software to prepare themselves for failure. This means that, in many cases, they had to duplicate their efforts and costs for ensuring the business continuity. With the cloud, the data is automatically mirrored on the data centers located at other locations – freeing up the businesses from worrying about data backup or excess costs.

Maximum Uptime and Zero Risk Failure: - Almost all the public cloud providers guarantee more than 99% uptime and no risk of failure. Since the overall cloud system interconnects several servers, in case of failure of any particular server, the other server takes over the workload automatically – ensuring a smooth and continuous performance for business critical applications. Cloud computing is no more just a buzzword. It is a proven and widely used option by SMBs worldwide. Typically, applications which are web-based, customer-facing, and require multiple users to connect from different locations, are most suitable for cloud deployment.

Please let me know in case of any clarifications required. Thanks!

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