Executive Summary
Project Description
Don & Associates, a financial consulting company that provides services to small- and medium-sized
companies is looking to expand into neighboring states and is assessing a viable solution to meet their
growing infrastructure needs.
Statement of Need
Don & Associates is struggling with how they can increase their infrastructure requirements to meet their
future expansion needs. The company will required end user devices to stand up their new office
locations, as well as a robust backup server to save and store company files and information.
Additionally, there are several databases of clients that must be accessed, updated, and saved by several
employees. They are looking for a secure way to host those databases and ensure they are availability
during office operating hours. Don & Associates will be benefited greatly by transitioning to a cloud
platform. Currently, IT staff are currently unable to expand the corporate datacenter and the on-site
servers are not reliable enough to support additional employees and locations. Moving to a cloud
platform will remove the need for onsite servers to host the client databases and will allow for increased
backup and storage capacity. Additionally, Don & Associates will not need to purchase the required
infrastructure necessary to support their additionally locations and staff. Having the ability to centralize
the database, reduce direct infrastructure purchase cost, and allow for additional expansion as they
continue to grow are the reasons a cloud would be the best option moving forward.
Cloud Service Providers
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud all offer software as a service
(SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each supports virtual
machines, websites, application, storage, data management, and media services; just to name a few.
Microsoft Azure has the most availability zones at 140, AWS has 61, and Google Cloud has 73. Azure
also has the best hybrid cloud support, allowing organizations to integrate their onsite servers with cloud
instances. Downsides of Azure is there are very few Linux options available and currently it does not
offer any long-term data archiving and retrieval.
AWS does offer long-term data archiving and retrieval and does has an extensive partner ecosystem.
Also, AWS is a mature system and is trusted by high-profile customers and has a simpler licensing
method. Disadvantages are that AWS’ elastic load balancer is not equipped to handle as many requests
as it receives, and if you are not especially tech savvy, then the customer support system and number of
choices AWS offers can be confusing.
Project Description
Don & Associates, a financial consulting company that provides services to small- and medium-sized
companies is looking to expand into neighboring states and is assessing a viable solution to meet their
growing infrastructure needs.
Statement of Need
Don & Associates is struggling with how they can increase their infrastructure requirements to meet their
future expansion needs. The company will required end user devices to stand up their new office
locations, as well as a robust backup server to save and store company files and information.
Additionally, there are several databases of clients that must be accessed, updated, and saved by several
employees. They are looking for a secure way to host those databases and ensure they are availability
during office operating hours. Don & Associates will be benefited greatly by transitioning to a cloud
platform. Currently, IT staff are currently unable to expand the corporate datacenter and the on-site
servers are not reliable enough to support additional employees and locations. Moving to a cloud
platform will remove the need for onsite servers to host the client databases and will allow for increased
backup and storage capacity. Additionally, Don & Associates will not need to purchase the required
infrastructure necessary to support their additionally locations and staff. Having the ability to centralize
the database, reduce direct infrastructure purchase cost, and allow for additional expansion as they
continue to grow are the reasons a cloud would be the best option moving forward.
Cloud Service Providers
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud all offer software as a service
(SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each supports virtual
machines, websites, application, storage, data management, and media services; just to name a few.
Microsoft Azure has the most availability zones at 140, AWS has 61, and Google Cloud has 73. Azure
also has the best hybrid cloud support, allowing organizations to integrate their onsite servers with cloud
instances. Downsides of Azure is there are very few Linux options available and currently it does not
offer any long-term data archiving and retrieval.
AWS does offer long-term data archiving and retrieval and does has an extensive partner ecosystem.
Also, AWS is a mature system and is trusted by high-profile customers and has a simpler licensing
method. Disadvantages are that AWS’ elastic load balancer is not equipped to handle as many requests
as it receives, and if you are not especially tech savvy, then the customer support system and number of
choices AWS offers can be confusing.
