Hybrid Cloud Architecture for MetaSoft: A Detailed Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of a hybrid cloud architecture implementation for MetaSoft Limited, a software company with operations in Australia and New Zealand. The company aims to modernize its Melbourne data center by migrating to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, leveraging technologies like Microsoft Azure and AWS Lambda to enhance high availability and flexibility. The report explores the proposed architecture, including the incorporation of Microsoft Azure, AWS Lambda, and containerization, detailing their respective advantages and disadvantages. It also addresses the risks associated with these technologies, proposing mitigation techniques and precautions for information security. Furthermore, the report discusses changes to the Business Continuity Plan, issues in resilience, disaster recovery systems, and backup strategies. It also touches upon hybrid cloud administration, service level agreements, and a checklist for implementation, along with a migration plan for SharePoint to the cloud architecture, highlighting potential issues and solutions. The overall objective is to provide a clear understanding of how MetaSoft can effectively implement a hybrid cloud solution to improve its operational efficiency and customer service.

Running head: HYBRID CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR METASOFT LIMITED
HYBRID CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR METASOFT LIMITED
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HYBRID CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR METASOFT LIMITED
Executive Summary:
Cloud computing is one of the most important techniques used in the modern world today in
most of the organizations. It makes use of the technique of virtualization in the workspace and all the
operational tasks can be managed and carried out remotely. Different networking concepts are used
and servers and hosts are used in the cloud network architecture.
This report will highlight the aspects of a cloud infrastructure implementation within a so ftware
company called Metasoft limited. The different aspects such as the cost factors, risks, advantages as well
as the disadvantages will be studied in the following paragraphs. By the end of the report, the reader
will have a clear idea on the working of cloud architectures within an organization.
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Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................................3
Proposed architecture for a hybrid cloud:...................................................................................................4
Architectures to be incorporated:...........................................................................................................5
Risks report of hybrid cloud architecture and the micro services:..............................................................8
Proposed precautions for information security:........................................................................................11
Changes to Business Continuity Plan.........................................................................................................12
Issues in Resilience................................................................................................................................12
Disaster Recovery System......................................................................................................................13
Backup...................................................................................................................................................13
Hybrid cloud administration and service level agreement:.......................................................................14
Checklist to be performed.....................................................................................................................16
SharePoint migration to cloud architecture..............................................................................................17
Migration Plan.......................................................................................................................................17
Issues in Migration Plan.........................................................................................................................18
Conclusion:................................................................................................................................................19
References:................................................................................................................................................20
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HYBRID CLOUD ARCHITECTURE FOR METASOFT LIMITED
Introduction:
Cloud computing is one of the most important and widely used computing techniques used in
the world toddy in different organizations. It is also known as hybrid cloud computing because it is a
hybridization technique that is used to integrate public as well as private cloud architectures to give a
common solution to all the data storage related as well as other concerns within an organization. When
or more public cloud architectural networks are merged with the traditional in house server and storage
systems, it results in the formation of a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Hybridization in cloud computing is
extremely important in today’s world due to the different risk factors associated with the traditional
computing and data storage techniques. It eliminates different risks associated to data storage and
other risks. IN other words, cloud computing is the future of organizations when every business related
tasks can be remotely and will ease the working operations of all organizations.
This report will study the case of a company called MetaSoft Ltd, which is a software company
headquartered in Australia and operates in New Zealand as well. The company is looking forward to
incorporate a cloud architecture within the organization. The company is planning to close rather
update the traditional working techniques and infrastructure in the Melbourne site. They are planning
to replace the old infrastructure in Melbourne with a hybrid cloud infrastructure and most updated
technologies like they presently have in their Sydney site. Through this, they are planning to increase
flexibility within their working business operational tasks as well as effectively make it beneficial for the
customers as well. The following report will highlight the different cloud infrastructures that can be
implemented within the company and the different aspects such as its risk factors, advantage and
disadvantages.
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Proposed architecture for a hybrid cloud:
Firstly, the reader must be aware of what a hybrid cloud infrastructure means. A cloud
computing architecture is nothing but the different network components and their sub components,
which are essential for carrying out the computing tasks within an organization. These different
components consists of working platforms, which are front end, example fat clients Fernando, (Loke &
Rahayu, 2013). It also consist of mobile and portable devices as well as thin clients and back end-
working platforms, for example servers and hard disk drives. The architecture of a cloud network also
consists of the internet, over which data can be transmitted across different devices even across
different geographical locations (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013).
Fig 1: Working of a hybrid cloud network (Source: As used by author).
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Architectures to be incorporated:
1. Microsoft Azure: Metasoft Ltd, which is a software company, wants to update the entire
infrastructure in its Melbourne site and wants to get it replaced with all the latest technologies
and cloud infrastructures that are presently present in its Sydney office. They want to
incorporate cloud architecture in order to achieve higher rate of availability (HA) within the
organization using cloud architectures such as Microsoft Azure, which is widely used and comes
with a number of advantages. It should be incorporated due to its low cost and the other
corporate benefits that are corporate friendly. Microsoft has come up with this technique for
deploying services and their applications, managing and testing the applications through a global
network, which is widespread. Microsoft consists the data centers storing the data. It provides
features such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) as well as
infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Different programing languages from third party vendors are
also supported in Azure (Copeland et al., 2015).
Benefits of using Microsoft Azure:
- It is extremely fast: The deployment speed is extremely fast, as well as its scope of
scalability within operational tasks.
- Improved business agility: The development cycle is obtained much faster without a very
expensive outlay; thereby giving Metasoft limited a much advantageous position.
- Excellent global reach: It can cater to the global needs of the organization since the
company is also present in New Zealand. It has flexible guidelines to operate globally.
Disadvantages of Microsoft Azure:
- Needs careful integration of application: The domains, which get mostly affected, are Third-
party vendors, web services, External storage devices such as hard disk drives, SMTP servers
as well as Payment gateway. These should be properly analyzed before Azure
implementation. Data insecurity can also cause performance lags.
- Staff management: Effective cloud management techniques have to be well explained to
the employees since both cloud and in home servers need to be properly managed. The
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application developers should have adequate knowledge about the complexities involved in
the implementation Microsoft Azure.
Fig 2: Microsoft Azure working diagram (Source: As used by author)
Amazon web services lambda: Amazon Web Services (AWS) lambda is owned and managed by the
popular ecommerce giant, which is Amazon.com. It provides cloud storage facility of data as well as
other cloud computing operational assistance to the different companies on a paid subscription basis,
which in turn allows remote management of servers. Metasoft can use this platform because of its
cheap costs and corporate friendly features. Metasoft ltd also wants to implement technologies such as
AWS lambda since data security is of utmost concern for the organization, which can effectively be
produced by this cloud platform. AWS Lambda is a kind of a computing platform, which does not make
use of a server. Amazon manages it as a part of Amazon web services. This service runs in response to
different events and it automatically manages different computing resources, which that code requires.
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Fig 3: AWS lambda architecture (Source: As used by the company)
Advantages of using AWS lambda:
- Security: AWS lambda data centers have a very tight 24/7 guard system and a very effective
disaster management system in case of any natural disasters as well as system failures. It
also makes use of a very strict Identity & Access Management (IAM) as well as a cloud audit
Trail feature to monitor what information has been accessed by which employee and at
what time (Hendrickson et al., 2016).
- Flexibility: Amazon machine images (AMIs) are used for self-managing and automatically
scaling which can closely align with the particular needs of Metasoft limited. This is done by
the systems by effective management of the traffic in the networks. Clones are circulated
across different geographic locations in very less time, thereby saving time by preventing the
same tasks to be performed repeatedly.
AWS lambda disadvantages:
- AWS lambda path of data flow and information in a data center is sometimes difficult for the
companies to follow and understand because of its complexities.
- National Products Inc (NPI) has recently declared that the billing structure is extremely
complicated for the client organization to follow where AWS lambda is incorporated.
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- In addition, AWS servers have a bad image of outage, which happened in the recent past.
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2. Containers and cloud computing: Containers are applications that offer a packaging mechanism,
which is very logical in nature, in which the different features are easily abstracted from the
working environment where they run. This decoupling feature allows the applications to be
easily deployed in a consistent fashion, even if the target environment is a personal data center,
a public cloud, or even the personal computer of the developer. This technique of
Containerization differentiates the concerns in a systematic way. Logic and dependencies of the
application are the main factors, which the developer focuses on, while Information technology
operations teams focus management as well as deployment without bothering configurations
specific to the applications (Villamizar et al., 2017).
Advantages of Containerization:
- They provide a runtime environment, which is very consistent: they give the developers
the provision to create environments that are predictable as well as isolated from any other
applications. They also include dependencies of software’s that are application specific,
example, specific programming language versions and their run times from different
software libraries. From the perspective of the developer’s, these are all consistent
irrespective of their area of deployment.
- They can be run anywhere: The containers can be virtually run on windows, Mac as well as
linux operating systems in the public cloud as well as the own systems of the developers.
Issues Associated with Containerization:
- Consistent gap in training: It is a very complex technique and needs proper education of
the employees in order to work with them.
- No scalability with applications and unpredictable performance: It consists of gateways as
well as container systems that are distributed– therefore comes with performance issues as
well as scalability challenges.
Risks report of hybrid cloud architecture and the micro services:
There are different risks that are associated to the implementation of Microsoft Azure, AWS
lamb da as well as Containerization, which can be explained below in the following tabular format:
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