Case Study #$1-$ Innovartus

$1-$ Introduction

The primary business line of Innovartus Technologies Inc. is the development of virtual toys

and educational entertainment products for children.

These services are provided through a Web portal that employs a role$-$playing model to create

customised virtual games for PCs and mobile devices. The games allow users to create and

manipulate virtual toys $($cars$,$ dolls, pets$)$ that can be outfitted with virtual accessories that

are obtained by completing simple educational quests. The main demographic is children

under $12$ years.

Innovartus further has a social network environment that enables users to exchange

items and collaborate with others. All of these activities can be monitored and tracked by the

parents, who can also participate in a game by creating specific quests for their children.

The most valuable and revolutionary feature of Innovartus' applications is an experimental

end$-$user interface that is based on natural interface concepts. Users can interact via voice

commands, simple gestures that are captured with a Webcam, and directly by touching tablet

screens.

The Innovartus portal has always been cloud$-$based. It was originally developed via a

PaaS platform and has been hosted by the same cloud provider ever since. However, recently

this environment has revealed several technical limitations that impact features of Innovartus'

user interface programming frameworks.

$2-$ Technical Infrastructure and Environment

Many of Innovartus' other office automation solutions, such as shared file repositories

and various productivity tools, are also cloud$-$based.

The on$-$premise corporate IT environment is relatively small, comprised mainly of work

area devices, laptops, and graphic design workstations$\mathrm{.}3-$ Roadmap

After a round of meetings with the stakeholders, Innovartus has decided to continue building

upon its cloud$-$based solutions; however, the current cloud hosting environment has

limitations that need to be overcome:

scalability needs to be improved to accommodate increased and less predictable cloud

consumer interaction;

service levels need to be improved to avoid outages that are currently more frequent

than expected;

cost effectiveness needs to be improved, as leasing rates are higher with the current cloud

provider when compared to others.

These and other factors have led Innovartus to decide to migrate to a larger, more

globally established cloud provider.Choose all the alternatives that would represent a viable solution for Innovartus considering

its current roadmap.

Note: Amazon EC$2($Amazon$),$ Microsoft Azure $($Azure$)$ and Google Compute Engine $($Google$)$

grant $10\%$ service credits if availability is below $99\mathrm{.}95\%.$

Availability metrics are impressive for Amazon, Azure and Google. This is a good indicative

that Innovartus would have good chances to improve its current availability metrics by moving to one

of those major cloud providers.

Amazon is the oldest and certainly one of the most reliable cloud providers in the world, even when

compared with Azure and Google. However, Innovartus would probably discard Amazon right from the

beginning because Amazon is also the most expensive one from them, in all scenarios.

The analyse to choose a provider should consider only the three items in Innovartus road map as all

providers will provide similar technology in terms of security, applications and features. As Innovartus'

applications also involve multimedia, the possibility of having GPUs available could also be relevant for

them.

Amazon, Azure and Google are all established, reliable companies. However, considering Innovartus

roadmap, Google would be the best fit from the three of them.