You must read the Regional Gardens Case Study in Interact before attempting this assignment

Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. These enterprises include the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden Planners which provides garden advice, design and consultancy services.

Regional Gardens has engaged you as a consultant to advise them on the use of Cloud Computing in their daily operations and they have asked you to prepare a report for their Board that looks at the following aspects of the proposal:

1. The first step of the board’s plan is to move the Regional Gardens website and associated web services into the cloud. However, they want some further information on: 
   1. Whether an IaaS or a PaaS model would be more appropriate for their web services and the advantages and disadvantages of each model in this case     (15 marks). 
   2. The board also want their web services architecture to be more resilient than in the past, and they want you to recommend an architecture to achieve resiliency  (15 marks).  
2. In keeping with the their new security policy, the Board want to keep all client and transaction data in the Bathurst Data Centre and not in the cloud. This means that clients accessing the Regional Gardens web site and web services will need to have any data that they upload stored in the Bathurst Data Centre. 
   1. Describe to the Board how you would arrange to have client data that is uploaded to the Regional Gardens web site and services stored in the Bathurst Data Centre.  (15 marks) 
   2. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.  (15 marks)   
3. Regional Gardens want to ensure that all their staff have the ability to access office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files, whether they are in the office, at home, or deployed on a customer’s site in the field. The Regional Gardens board is very concerned to learn about the critical issues, other than cost, that may affect the supply of Cloud based office automation to their staff. You will need to prepare a report on the best way to provide office automation for Regional Gardens. Your report should: 
   1. Provide Regional Gardens with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff;  (10 marks) 
   2. Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach;   (5 marks) 
   3. Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose.  (5 marks) 
4. The garden design unit uses the DynaScape software suite, which is installed locally on their laptops, to design gardens and landscapes for their clients. The design staff often spend long periods at a clients property while collecting data and designing. The Board are uncertain if they should retain local installations of this software or subscribe to the SaaS version of DynaScape.  Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.    (20 marks)

Your report should not exceed 10 pages, excluding references. 

RATIONALE

This assessment task will assess the following learning outcome/s:

• be able to compare and evaluate the ability of different cloud computing architectures to meet a set of given business requirements.
• be able to evaluate a set of business requirements to determine suitability for a cloud computing delivery model.