You have been hired to help a small retail company move to the cloud. Below are some specifics about the company:
1. The company consists of 30 employees spread across 3 locations in Denver (USA), Quebec City (Canada), and Nice (France).
2. The company has retail locations in Denver and Nice along with an online presence. A small product design team is located in Quebec City. Currently the website is hosted on Squarespace and that is where their orders are processed. They want to move from Squarespace to a more robust setup.
3. The three locations are connected to each other via hardware VPN connections via the Internet. The main hardware (very small data center) is located in the Denver office. Some employees connect remotely to the corporate network via software VPNs.
Your task is to create a report for the company that makes an argument in favor of moving to the cloud taking into account the items above, along with the concerns identified below:
1. The company currently has 2 full time IT professionals (Denver and Nice) and would like to keep both on staff. These professionals would be responsible for the cloud environment but will require some training.
2. The company is worried about compliance of relevant regulations. Identify the various government and non-governmental regulations they would need to comply with. Take into account their 3 locations and don’t forget the online presence.
3. The company is not opposed to moving from hardware located on-prem to cloud systems, but you need to address their concerns about data security in the cloud.
4. The company is concerned about losing connection to their systems if they move to the cloud, which could interrupt their business processes. Address these concerns with regards to cloud computing redundancy.
5. You don’t have enough information on this scenario to identify specific costs to support your case but make sure you talk about the economics of cloud computing and how it can benefit an organization.
