It risk, security and management

Task

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Read the DTGOV Case Study before you attempt this assignment 

A chief strategic objective of the standardisation of DTGOV’s service portfolio is to achieve increased levels of cost-effectiveness and operational optimisation.

DTGOV is considering the following strategic proposal:

• They plan to retain one (1) of their three (3) data centres solely for data storage. This would entail updating their Active Directory and data storage infrastructure, and moving all other infrastructure into the Cloud.  
• They plan to initially move all their Web Services into the Cloud in order to provide an increased level of HA (High Availability) as well as a better degree of flexibility in supplying data to their customers and employees. This would entail changing their current web software architecture to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability that can be gained by moving to a Microservices model (this would entail the use of such services as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, Containers, Data Services, and Cloud Edge capability and monitoring).
• They also plan to migrate their LoB (Line of Business) applications to Public Cloud infrastructure to increase their flexibility and availability.  

The DTGOV Board is contemplating this strategy as a way to increase the company’s flexibility and responsiveness. The Board also expects to achieve significant savings on the cost of maintaining their ICT infrastructure by eventually closing the other two (2) existing data centres. They appreciate that this would entail retraining for their existing ICT staff so that they can manage the new Cloud based infrastructure.

DTGOV has again approached you to advise them on this strategy. You have previously advised DTGOV that this strategic approach will mean that they will need to ultimately design and operate a “Hybrid Cloud” methodology, where part of their data centre is “on premise” and another part in a Cloud.

DTGOV also plan to run a Risk and Security Workshop to assess the risks, security issues and possible methods of control that will be required with this “Hybrid Cloud” approach. You will be required to organise, run and facilitate this workshop.

The Board is also concerned about how this strategy will affect their BCP (Business Continuity Plan) and their backup and disaster recovery strategies.

Tasks
Your team has been engaged to provide a report for DTGOV in their planned move to a Hybrid Cloud strategy. 

Team Setup
This assignment is a team assignment. The rationale for using a team approach is that most IT risk management assessments are normally done by teams of between 2-5 Architects, Information Security experts, Operations and Business leaders for each problem. You will be assigned to a team and the team, as a whole, will be responsible for the development of the risk assessment.

Team Member Responsibilities
Each team member will be assessed on:

• The final risk assessment presented by the team;
• The individual contributions that they have made to the risk assessment. This will be shown by the entries that they have made in the Team forum;
• Team members should note that:
  • A total of 20% of the total marks for this assignment are for individual contributions to the team task;
  • A team member without any individual contributions in the Team Forum will be regarded as having not contributed to the risk assessment. This will result in either reduced marks or no marks being awarded to that team member for this assignment.

The tasks:
The team’s task is to prepare a report for DTGOV that discusses the following:

1. Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist DTGOV to meet the Board’s strategy?
   1. Describe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it. (10 marks)
   2. Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures. (10 marks)
2. Describe the risks that you see associated with this new Hybrid Cloud and Microservices strategy. You should name and describe each risk that you identify, and then describe a possible control for the risk. This should be presented in a tabular form. (20 marks)
3. Describe the general Information Security steps and controls that you would recommend to the Board to secure the Hybrid Cloud. You will need to explain to the Board your reasons for recommending these particular security steps. (20 marks)
4. Discuss briefly what you would recommend should be included in DTGOV’s BCP as a result of their adoption of a Hybrid Cloud and Microservices approach. You will need to consider, as a minimum, the issues of application resilience, backup and disaster recovery in a Hybrid Cloud environment. This section should be no more than 2 pages. (10 marks)
5. Discuss the requirements that DTGOV will need to consider in order to conduct remote server administration, resource management and SLA management for its proposed IaaS and PaaS instances (it may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjan’s operational checklists for this section). This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. (10 marks)

The team is to provide a written report with the following headings:

• Proposed Architectures for a Hybrid Cloud
• Risk report for Hybrid Cloud and Microservices
• Proposed Information Security controls
• BCP Changes
• Hybrid Cloud Administration and SLA Management

As a rough guide, the report should not be longer than about 6,000 words. The report is to be loaded into the Team Resource area in Interact.

All risk assessment discussions in the team forum should be exported into a single document and loaded into the Team Resource area in Interact.

It is suggested that the report should be written using Google Docs using MS Word format. Google Docs allows multiple authors to contribute to a single document, and their individual contributions can be more easily assessed.
 

Your team report MUST be presented in MS Word format. Your report should:

• Use Calibri, or a similar font, in 11 or 12 point type.
• All diagrams and images are to be embedded in the document. Diagrams and images that are suppliued separately will not be marked.
• All text should be left-justified.
• Each page must have a header or footer with your name and student number. Page numbers must be shown in the footer of each page, except on the title page.