Activity Overview: In this graded activity, students will utilize what they’ve learned in this course to evaluate a cloud-migration business case, with the intent to offer a viable Return on Investment (ROI) to the requesting organization.

Students will determine which cloud services best suit the pre-existing assets and services, then build a cost-estimate for 1 year of usage. Finally, students will summarize their findings with the intent to deliver them to high-level executives.

Utilize what you’ve learned about Cloud Services during this course to determine a good financial outcome for the business case below. Be creative, and think critically!

Activity Outcomes: After completing this activity students will be able to:

• Identify comparable cloud-services to on-premise assets
• Assess differences in network operational and capital expenditures
• Create a high-level Cost Analysis for Cloud-based services

Deliverable: Upload all requested deliverables below, as a .pdf export from the editor of your choosing.

Naming convention: “lastnamefirstinitial_Activity#” e.g: “smithp_A1.1.pdf”

Be sure to include your name, student number, and course (CNW-2511) at the top of your document.

The Business Case: Holiday Emporium

Holiday Emporium is a seasonal distributor of Winter holiday promotional items (decorations, cards, costumes, etc.). They service nationally, and recently identified major flaws in their current financial model which include IT expenditures.

You have been asked to consult with Holiday Emporiums’ internal IT team to help assess the potential viability of migrating IT assets and services to a Cloud Service Provider. The CIO of the organization has determined that Microsoft Azure is their only viable path at this time, considering all of their current architecture is built around Microsoft products, and established these other constraints which must be followed:

Use your knowledge of cloud services gained during this course to identify the appropriate method to migrate the below hardware assets. We discussed and configured the following Azure items which may help determine what cloud services to use in replacement of the current assets, and the lowest outcome Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

• VM’s and VM sizes
• Virtual Networks
• Network Peering
• Virtual Gateways (VNet – VNet VPN and Site to VNet VPN)
• Load-Balancers
• App Services (Serverless Apps)
• Scaling VM’s and App Services
• Firewalls

All servers (web and SQL) are of the following specifications:

• 8-core CPU’s
• 4 TB HDD or SSD Storage (beyond the baked-in temporary storage)
• 32 GB RAM

Utilize the given I/O and request information to research the possibility of down-sizing certain compute resources (web and SQL), as well as potential scaling options for peak-season/off-season changes. Keep in mind, that App Services (Serverless Applications) might be a great solution for some of the below services, considering the variation of traffic and workload throughout the year.

Include the following Capital Expenditure in your ROI assessment: Holiday Emporium spends an additional average of $70,000 per year for tech-refresh of the IT assets listed below.

Assets/Services Requested for Migration:

1. There are currently three (3) regional hubs:
   1. California (Annual TCO = $75,000):
      1. Three (3) Load-Balanced, public web-hosting servers which handle approximately 10,000 requests per day during the periods of October – January (peak-season). During other months, requests dwindle to an average of 500 per day (off-season).
      2. One (1) VPN router connecting internal systems to the other two regional sites (2 connections), pushing approximately 2 TB I/O per month each, year-round.
      3. One (1) Firewall pushing approximately 4 TB I/O per month during the peak season, and 2 TB during off-season.
   2. Texas (Annual TCO = $100,000):
      1. Two (2) Load-Balanced, private web-hosting servers which provide employee access to local SQL databases. These servers handle approximately 1,000 requests per day, year-round, and push approximately 2 TB I/O per month, year-round.
      2. Four (4) SQL Databases with 4 TB of storage each. These DB’s are load-balanced in a 2×2 fashion. One set of DB’s is for customer data, the other set is for warehouse inventory tracking.
      3. One (1) VPN router connecting to the other two sites (2 connections), pushing approximately 2 TB I/O per month each, year-round.
      4. One (1) Firewall pushing approximately 2 TB I/O per month, year-round.
   3. Pennsylvania (Annual TCO = $50,000):
      1. Two (2) Load-Balanced, private web-hosting servers which provide general administration access for the company. These servers handle approximately 5,000 requests per day, year-round.
      2. One (1) VPN router connecting to the other two sites (2 connections), pushing approximately 1 TB I/O per month.
      3. One (1) Firewall pushing approximately 1 TB I/O per month.

Cost Analysis

One of the first steps in preparing a project plan for migration of assets and services to the cloud is to assess the potential Return on Investment (ROI). To do this (at a high level) is to simply identify what assets/services should be migrated, and calculate their cost over an appropriate period of time.

This factor of time will be different across industries and organizations, but generally a 1-3 year assessment will yield enough data to identify whether or not migration is in the best interest of your organization.

Using the above business case as a reference, utilize the to create a 1-year cost assessment to integrate into your ROI evaluation.

Assemble an itemized pricing inventory for all requested assets/services into a spreadsheet format (Excel or Google Sheets is appropriate). Azure Pricing Calculator can export your work into an Excel spreadsheet for further editing.

You will use this cost prediction to help determine whether or not cloud migration is a viable option for the Holiday Emporium.

You will need to investigate your options and perform additional research to make your determinations and service selections.

Summarize your findings and recommendations in a 300-500 word essay to be included with your deliverable.

Example of the Azure Pricing Calculator for Two SQL server VM’s with 100 million transactions for 1- year of usage

Exported spreadsheet of the calculated cost for the SQL servers shown above. Note the changes to description, and inclusion of the current cost listed on the right.