Detailed Analysis and Report on Cloud Migration for ITTraining101

This report analyzes the cloud migration strategy for ITTraining101, an IT training business facing storage and internet cost challenges. The solution involves migrating servers to the cloud using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), with the domain controller remaining on-premise. The report details IaaS benefits, such as scalability and cost-effectiveness, and Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) for data protection. It also examines cloud security issues like data breaches and denial-of-service attacks. The report compares major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and discusses pricing models. The implementation plan involves migrating data storage, Exchange Server, and web servers to the cloud, with a focus on Australian data protection laws. The report concludes with recommendations for successful cloud migration and emphasizes the importance of monitoring service usage and addressing potential performance issues.

Title
Name
Institution

Executive Summary
ITTraining101 is an IT Training business located in Adelaide, and came into existence in the
year 2008, specializing in offering Information technology courses through distance learning.
The business currently services students from all over the world. The IT infrastructure at the
institution consists of 5 servers. The main issues currently is that storage space is almost running
out, internet costs are extremely high - with the institution using up more than the allocated quota
of 1200GB.With the current growth, the available server and network infrastructure can no
longer handle the demand and is impacting on quality of services.
To ensure that the business continuous to operate optimally, and avoid costs associated with
infrastructure purchase for an improved data center, the servers will be migrated to the cloud.
The Network services server hosting the Domain controller will be left at the premise, while the
rest of the servers will be migrated to the cloud. The servers and services to be moved to the
cloud are;
 Data storage include data backup and recovery
 Exchange Server
 Web Servers
The move will require the business to take up Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud services. With
IaaS a cloud services provider builds a robust infrastructure and provides it to customers over the
internet. Besides providing the necessary infrastructure components, a cloud provider also
provides services that help manage and secure the infrastructure, such as backup, replication ,
recovery, storage resiliency, clustering, load balancing, security , log access, monitoring and
detailed billing.
A huge number of players have come up to offer cloud computing services. Three plays however
stand out among the rest the biggest cloud services providers, namely; Google with their Google
Cloud, Microsoft with its Microsoft Azure and Amazon with Amazon Web Services. The three
companies have a wide range of services covering all the major cloud services domains.

Contents
Executive Summary.....................................................................................................................................2
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................4
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).................................................................................................................6
Recovery as a Service (RaaS).......................................................................................................................8
Analysis of Cloud Service Providers.............................................................................................................9
Legal and Legislative Constraints...............................................................................................................11
Cloud Security issues.................................................................................................................................11
Data Breaches........................................................................................................................................12
Advanced Persistent threats (APTs):......................................................................................................12
Denial of Service Attacks:......................................................................................................................12
Cloud Computing Pricing Models..............................................................................................................12
On-Demand...........................................................................................................................................13
Reserved Instances model.....................................................................................................................13
Per Second Billing..................................................................................................................................13
Implementation.........................................................................................................................................13
Conclusion and Recommendation.............................................................................................................14
References.................................................................................................................................................15

Introduction
ITTraining101 is an IT Training business located in Adelaide, and came into existence in the
year 2008, specializing in offering Information technology courses through distance learning.
Having been in operation for sometimes now, the school has grown in leap and bounds and is no
longer servicing Australian students only. The business currently services students from all over
the world. The IT infrastructure at the institution consists of 5 servers. The main issues currently
is that storage space is almost running out, internet costs are extremely high - with the institution
using up more than the allocated quota of 1200GB.With the current growth, the available server
and network infrastructure can no longer handle the demand and is impacting on quality of
services.
From the interview with the managing director, the most suitable solution would be to shift the
server/network infrastructure to the cloud. As it stands, the current network infrastructure does
not support the computing needs of the business and is affecting quality of services. The
company is also not ready to invest much in acquiring additional hardware, software and
bandwidth required to correct the problem. The only viable option therefore is to migrate most of
the server infrastructure to the cloud.
The current servers include one Domain controller, One Exchange Server that servers Emails for
both students and staff, three Web Servers that hosts all websites for the company and SANS
storage solution. From the analysis, not all servers need to be migrated to the cloud. The
Network services server hosting the Domain controller will be left at the premise, while the rest
of the servers will be migrated to the cloud. The decision to leave the domain controller on the

premise is to allow the network administrators to have more control over the network. With
regards to storage, all storage requirements will be migrated to the cloud, and backups will be
deployed on different sites within the cloud provider’s data centers.
In Summary the following services will be migrated to the cloud;
 Data storage include data backup and recovery
 Exchange Server
 Web Servers
With cloud computing, the distribution and location of service centers becomes borderless.
However, the most preferred location of service would be within the boundaries of Australia, in
order to comply with existing laws and regulations that govern handling of personal data. Cloud
computing has major benefits to organizations adopting the model, such as ease of scalability,
increased agility and economics of scale. However, uptake of cloud services exposes an
organization to underlying security challenges that are common over the internet (Khoury, 2017).
Bearing in mind that the business handles information about individuals – which contains critical
and personally identifiable information, the move to take up cloud computing has to comply with
a number of personal data protection laws and regulations set in Australia. The three services
will be provided through various cloud technologies. In particular the technologies to be relied
on include; Infrastructure as a service and backup as a service.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that offers virtualized
Infrastructure over the internet. With IaaS a cloud services provider builds a robust infrastructure
and provides it to customers over the internet, thus replacing what a customer or organization

would ordinarily have in a data center. Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides access to computing
resources such as networking hardware, storage and hypervisor layer. Besides providing the
necessary infrastructure components, a cloud provider also provides services that help manage
and secure the infrastructure, such as backup, replication , recovery, storage resiliency,
clustering, load balancing, security , log access, monitoring and detailed billing.
With the growth and acceptance of cloud computing, services such as Infrastructure as a Service
have become increasingly policy-driven, enabling Infrastructure-as-a-Service customers to
implement greater levels of automation and orchestration for important infrastructure tasks. For
example a customer can design and implement own policies that govern load balancing to ensure
high availability of applications and increase performance. The services are accessible through
the internet, allowing a customer to access what is provided by a cloud provider, and to install
additional elements that may be required to complete an application stack.
Adopting IaaS is largely driven by the fact that it is easy, faster and cost effective to deploy and
operate heavy computing workloads without the need to invest heavily in the underlying
infrastructure. The model enables businesses to simply lease computing infrastructure, thus
facilitating faster deployment of applications required for the business and saving upfront cost
that would have otherwise be used to purchase the infrastructure components.
The IaaS model is very effective for use in situations where the computing workloads fluctuates
rapidly – sometimes requiring a lot of computing resources and at times requiring minimal
resources – as well as where the workloads are experimental or temporary. Instances such as
when a business is in the process of developing a software system, the business can test the
application on an IaaS platform, enabling the development process to continue as the business
develops the necessary in-house infrastructure to host the system once complete. Alternatively

the business can choose to use the cloud platform to host the complete system and avoid
developing in-house infrastructure.
In a situation where business workload fluctuates rapidly, an IaaS model is of great benefit, due
to its elastic nature, which allows a business to have more resources at its disposal when demand
rises and only consuming minimal resources as demands goes down. The IaaS pricing model is
on a pay per use basis, which means that a business only pays for resources used. The model of
pay-as-you-go removes the capital expense of deploying in-house hardware and software. In the
event that the nature of a business cannot allow use of a third-party cloud services, a company
can develop a private cloud which can still provide a great deal of control and scalability, but
eliminates the cost benefits associated with the use of a third-party cloud service.
Although the IaaS model provides a great number of benefits such as scalability, flexibility and
cost saving in upfront expenses, the model has a number of problems. The billing model of the
IaaS services is particularly granular, subdivided to show the exact usage of services. In some
cases, customers can be shocked to receive bills higher than they anticipated. It is therefore
necessary for customers to constantly monitor the service usage to avoid charges for
unauthorized services.
A second concern with IaaS is insight issues. The IaaS provider owns and controls the
infrastructure. As such system monitoring and management can sometimes be difficult to users
as the model lacks transparency in terms of infrastructure configuration and performance. The
multi-tenancy architecture of the service can also cause issues that can have negative effects on
users’ workloads. Lastly availability and performance may sometimes affect the performance of
the service; if a network or server downtime is experienced by the provider users’ workloads
would greatly be affected.

Currently, there are numerous cloud services providers offering IaaS services. Among the
providers, three particular providers stands out as the market leaders; Amazon AWS, Microsoft
Azure and Google Compute. AWS offers services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and
storage services such as Simple Storage Services S3. Google provides the Google Compute
Engine (GCE).
Recovery as a Service (RaaS)
Recovery-as-a-Service also called disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a cloud computing
category that is focused on providing protection and recovery services of both applications and
data. The model provides additional services beyond what a normal cloud backup service
provides, as it also provides data protection services and provides a standby computing facility
that can be used on demand to enable rapid application recovery. Like other cloud computing
services this model is very cost effective as the service is only paid for when used, unlike an on-
premise recovery which has to remain active throughout.
With RaaS, the business in this case study would have all its servers and virtual machines on a
given cloud provider replicated to provide failover in the event that the initial servers of the
cloud provider experiences an outage or a catastrophe. Customer requirements for a RaaS as well
as expectations are outlined in a service-level agreement (SLA). In a cloud environment, RaaS
can be provided by the same cloud provider, although the recovery services are hosted on a data
center that is located geographically far from the initial servers hosting the primary services. In
an unfortunate event that the primary site suffers from a disaster, the second site takes over
seamlessly.
Recovery as a Service provides many advantages to businesses; the model is particularly
beneficial to startups and small and medium-sized businesses that may be lacking the necessary

expertise to provision configure and test an effective disaster recovery plan. Use of Recovery as
a Service also enables an organization to have access to high end offsite recovery options,
without the need to develop and maintain its own off-site disaster recovery service.
The main drawback with disaster recovery as a service is the fact that a business has to trust the
cloud service provider to implement a disaster recovery plan. Other disadvantages include the
possible performance issues that may be related to the offsite recovery.
Among the many cloud computing providers, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure
and IBM stands out as the market leaders in the areas of disaster recovery.
Analysis of Cloud Service Providers
With the success and rapid growth of the cloud computing model, a huge number of plays both
small and large have come up to offer the services. Three plays however stand out among the rest
the biggest cloud services providers, namely; Google with their Google Cloud, Microsoft with its
Microsoft Azure and Amazon with Amazon Web Services. The three companies have a wide
range of services covering all the major cloud services domains. Amazon offers its computing
and platform-as-a-service through the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and storage services such as
Simple Storage Services S3. This is a form of an instance where a customer can deploy an
operating system and other application clusters designed to run a given service, software or
database system. Amazon also offers a wide range of computing services such as EC2
containers, AWS lambda, Auto-scaling and Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment.
On Microsoft Azure and Google cloud, compute services are provided through the use of virtual
machines (VMs). A customer deploys their application on virtual machines that they have
control over and can customize to fit the needs.

All the three cloud providers supports a wide range of Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu,
CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, CoreOS, Debian among others. For network services,
AWS has features that make it possible for an organization to connect its enterprise network to
the cloud network, thus enabling virtualization of the network on the cloud. The network features
provided by AWS include; DNS services, Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Route 53, Elastic Load
balancing and AWS Direct Connect. Such features facilitate the isolation of an enterprise’s cloud
infrastructure, while enabling scaling of the network’s load handling capacity (Copeland, 2015).
Microsoft Azure provides a range of network services that includes Virtual Networks, Network
Security Groups, Express Route, VPN Gateway, Load Balancer and Route Tables (Copeland,
2015). The Express Route provided on Azure facilitates the establishment of a dedicated secure
private connection between the cloud and an organization’s physical network (Copeland, 2015).
Azure also provides a VPN Gateway which enables the routing of network traffic between a
cloud-based virtualized network and an organization’s physical network, facilitating provision of
a highly secure, accessible, highly available and easy to manage network (Copeland, 2015).
On storage, Amazon Web Services provides a range of storage technologies such as Simple
Storage (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Elastic File System (EFS), Glacier archive backup
and Storage Gateway (Copeland, 2015). Its Elastic Cache storage technology provides a
distributed, high-performance memory caching, which aids in alleviating database loads and
increasing performance of dynamic web applications (Copeland, 2015). With Microsoft Azure,
storage is made possible through the use of Azure Storage service which is the core storage
service, Azure Blob block, Table and Queues as well as File storage.

Legal and Legislative Constraints
With cloud computing, the distribution and location of service centers becomes borderless.
However, the most preferred location of service would be within the boundaries of Australia, in
order to comply with existing laws and regulations that govern handling of personal data. Cloud
computing has major benefits to organizations adopting the model, such as ease of scalability,
increased agility and economics of scale. However, uptake of cloud services exposes an
organization to underlying security challenges that are common over the internet (Khoury, 2017).
Bearing in mind that the business handles information about individuals – which contains critical
and personally identifiable information, the move to take up cloud computing has to comply with
a number of personal data protection laws and regulations set in Australia.
Migrating the servers and data storage to the cloud has to comply with the Australia’s Privacy
Act and its enhanced version; The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Act
2012. The act focuses on regulating the collection and handling of personal information (Khoury,
2017). Such information may include financial information, health information, race, religion
and ethnicity. Before migrating to the cloud, the organization has to provide certainty that the
privacy of such information is not compromised in anyway.
Cloud Security issues
Security is a major concern in a cloud environment. The multi-tenancy nature of the cloud means
that many organizations are hosted on a given server. Since cloud services are delivered over the
internet, the cloud model inherits all security issues synonymous with the World Wide Web
(CSA, 2016). The two factors make cloud computing platforms a niche target for attackers. If
ITTraining101 is to adopt a cloud solution, it is worth noting that the service may face security
challenges, key among them;

Data Breaches: the huge amount of data hosted on a cloud platform motivates attackers to try
and breach the security checks in place. How server the problem is depends on how sensitive the
data is. For ITTraining101, personal data will be hosted on the platform and may invite attackers.
Advanced Persistent threats (APTs): these attackers uses a parasitic model of attack
where advance computer viruses infiltrate a system, establishes a footing within the IT systems
and uses its stealthily camouflaged position to remit data to its command and control server
(CSA, 2016).
Denial of Service Attacks: With cloud computing, DoS and DDoS attacks can occur, that
are either meant to inhibit an organization from accessing its computing resources or designed to
slow down access, utilize high amount of computing resources, resulting in a huge bill to the
organization - thus the attack is a form of economic DoS (CSA, 2016).
Cloud Computing Pricing Models
With Amazon Web Services (AWS), cloud services are billed for the exact amount of resources
a given customer needs. The billing uses a utility-style pricing model. For testing purposes, AWS
offers a one year free AWS usage tier, which runs on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance and has
limited access to other AWS services such as AWS data transfer, Amazon Elastic Load
Balancing, Amazon Elastic Block Store and Amazon S3 storage service (Amazon, 2016).
Amazon customizes the pricing model into the following categories;
On-Demand: A customer pays for exact resource consumed on a hourly basis for compute
services and per gigabyte basis for data storage and transfers services. A customer can turn off
the service when not using to avoid paying for unused time (Amazon, 2016).

Reserved Instances model: A customer can reserve a given amount of capacity. With this
model, a customer gets a highly discounted hourly rate (Amazon, 2016).
Per Second Billing: every second that a resource was used is billed; the system automatically
removes unused minutes. Usage of EC2 instance is done on one second increments, with a
minimum of 60 seconds (Amazon, 2016).
Implementation
Implementation was done on Amazon web services EC2 instances. Three instances were created;
two running Ubuntu Linux Server and hosting websites, while the third one runs Microsoft
Windows Server OS, and hosts the Exchange Server services.
An S3 instance was created for purposes of storage of data, as all data storage will be migrated to
the cloud. Since the network services were left on site, there was no need to create networking
services.

Conclusion and Recommendation
Adopting a cloud solution would be necessary for ITTraining101 as it will enable the business to
have access to high end computing resources, without much expenditure on purchase of the
required infrastructure. The business will need to adopt an Infrastructure-as-a-service as well as a
backup-as-a-service.
With the success and rapid growth of the cloud computing model, a huge number of plays both
small and large have come up to offer the services. Three plays however stand out among the rest
the biggest cloud services providers, namely; Google with their Google Cloud, Microsoft with its
Microsoft Azure and Amazon with Amazon Web Services.
If deployed on Amazon web services, the cloud solution for ITTraining101 will be made up of 3
EC2 instances, which will make up for the;
 Data storage server
 Exchange Server
 Web Servers

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