Scenario
You have recently been hired as the IT Manager for Wrexham Food & Home, a retail chain headquartered in Wrexham and having branch offices in Cardiff and Swansea. The Wrexham headquarters manages all finance, HR, marketing and sales. The Cardiff office manages customer service and customer support while the Swansea offices handle procurement and supply chain. Wrexham Food & Home operate nearly 100 retail stores across Wales. The company employs nearly 1000 employees across its three offices and retail stores. The company’s suppliers are from across the UK. Currently, the company operates its own IT infrastructure in its Swansea office. Most of the IT team are based in Swansea.
The business has recently developed a three year expansion plans to increase the number of stores and to also start an e-commerce service. The company also wants to build a new analytics function for customer data and plans to launch a loyalty scheme. Alongside, the business will also procure a new CRM system, which will house all customer data. All three of these initiatives are expected to be operational in the next two years.
The company has realised that it needs to build a new website with a customer portal, where customers can buy products and schedule their deliveries. The portal will also enable customers to keep track of their loyalty points and vouchers, and also manage their account. The on-premise IT systems include Exchange servers of e-mail, a supply chain management system and an inventory management system. The supply chain management system is supported by an external supplier whereas the inventory management system was built by the business nearly 20 years ago. The business has implemented some sensors and IoT devices in its warehouses to monitor temperature and humidity, but all responses are conducted manually with human intervention.
The senior management of Wrexham Food & Home feel that their current IT infrastructure is constrained and cannot deliver the planned expansion. They would like to understand what the scope is for migrating to the cloud and have tasked you with considering an options evaluation for building the IT infrastructure to support the expansion.
Your overall task is to prepare a cloud migration report. This should enable the business to launch its loyalty scheme, gather relevant customer and purchases data to perform analytics. It should also enable launching the e-commerce operations.
You will be developing the plan in two parts.
Assignment 1 Task
Prepare a report covering the following:
• Based on information above about the IT systems currently in use at Wrexham Food & Home, an assessment of the current network infrastructure and how it could be adapted to a cloud-based network infrastructure.
• Which cloud services would be relevant to the company and why?
• SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and/or other “as a Service” options for the different systems.
• Whether the company needs private, public or hybrid cloud solutions along with justification.
• Your justified recommendation for whether the business needs to adopt network function virtualisation.
submission should be 1500 words (+/- 10%)