Complete the assigned weekly reading and review the case study listed below. Respond to the questions below in a 4-6 page Word document. APA format is required to include 12-point font ONLY using Times New Roman, and please ensure you see your syllabus for any additional writing requirements from your instructor. Assignments are worth 20 points each and will be graded on content, spelling, and grammar. You must use at least (2) external references to support your original positions outside the textbook.

Interconnect-Communications is a company that provides network equipment to telecommunications industries across the globe. Over the years, Interconnect-Communications has grown considerably, and its product portfolio has expanded to accommodate several acquisitions, including companies specializing in infrastructure components for Internet, GSM, and cellular providers. Interconnect-Communications is now a leading supplier of a diverse range of telecommunications infrastructure.

In recent years, market pressure has been increasing. Interconnect-Communications has begun to increase its competitiveness and efficiency by taking advantage of new technologies, especially those that can reduce costs.

Technical Infrastructure and Environment

Interconnect-Communications' acquisitions have resulted in a highly complex and heterogeneous IT landscape. A cohesive consolidation program was not applied to the IT environment after each acquisition round, resulting in similar applications running concurrently and increasing maintenance costs. In 2015, ATN merged with a major European telecommunications supplier, adding another applications portfolio to its inventory. The IT complexity snowballed into a severe obstruction and became a critical concern to the Interconnect-Communications board of directors.

Business Goals and New Strategy

Interconnect-Communications management decided to pursue a consolidation initiative and outsource applications maintenance and operations overseas. This lowered costs but did not address their overall operational inefficiency. Applications still had overlapping functions that could not be easily consolidated. It eventually became apparent that outsourcing was insufficient, as consolidation became possible only if the architecture of the entire IT landscape changed.

As a result, Interconnect-Communications decided to explore the potential of adopting cloud computing as a green field which may lead to a potential ability to get to an actual consolidation model. However, after their initial inquiries, they became overwhelmed by the plenitude of cloud providers and cloud-based products to help understand what this strategy would look like.

Roadmap and Implementation Strategy

Interconnect-Communications is unsure of how to choose the right cloud computing technologies and vendorsmany solutions appear to be still immature and new cloud-based offerings continue to emerge in the market.

A preliminary cloud computing adoption roadmap is discussed to address several key points:

IT Strategy The adoption of cloud computing needs to promote optimization of the current IT framework and produce lower short-term investments and consistent long-term cost reduction.

Business Benefits ATN must evaluate which current applications and IT infrastructure can leverage cloud computing technology to achieve the desired optimization and cost reductions. Additional cloud computing benefits, such as greater business agility, scalability, and reliability, must be realized to promote business value.

Technology Considerations Criteria must be established to help choose the most appropriate cloud delivery and deployment models, vendors, and products.

Cloud Security The risks associated with migrating applications and data to the cloud must be determined.

ATN fears they might lose control over their applications and data if entrusted to cloud providers, leading to incompliance with internal policies and telecom market regulations. They also wonder how their legacy applications would be integrated into the new cloud-based domain.

To define a succinct plan of action, Interconnect-Communications hires an independent IT consulting company called TechPartners which is well recognized for its technology architecture expertise in the transition and integration of cloud computing IT resources. TechPartners consultants begin by suggesting an appraisal process comprised of five steps:

A brief evaluation of existing applications to measure complexity, business-criticality, usage frequency, and number of active users. The identified factors are then placed in a hierarchy of priority to help determine the most suitable candidate applications for migration to a cloud environment.

A more detailed evaluation of each selected application using a proprietary assessment tool.

The development of a target application architecture that exhibits the interaction between cloud-based applications, their integration with Interconnect-Communication's existing infrastructure and legacy systems, and their development and deployment processes.

The authoring of a preliminary business case that documents projected cost savings based on performance indicators, such as cost of cloud readiness, the effort for application transformation and interaction, ease of migration and implementation, and various potential long-term benefits.

The development of a detailed project plan for a pilot application.

Interconnect-Communications proceeds with the process and resultantly builds its first prototype by focusing on an application that automates a low-risk business area. During this project, Interconnect-Communications ports several of the business areas smaller applications running on different technologies over to a PaaS platform. Based on positive results and feedback received for the prototype project, Interconnect-Communications decided to embark on a strategic initiative to garner similar benefits for other company areas.

Answer the following questions substantively:

What drove Interconnect-Communications to consider using cloud computing as an alternative to their current various subsidiary and core models for application hosting?

What are additional considerations that Interconnect-Communications needs to consider and fully vetted to ensure that their applications and services can migrate to a centralized hosting model in the public cloud (think people, process, and technology)

As an international corporation, what does Interconnect-Communications need to consider from a controls perspective to ensure the security of their customer data and potential exposures to cloud providers that may bring in regulatory or financial risk

(see reference links below for some ideas)

References

The 'Schrems II' decision: EU-US data transfers in question links to an external site.

LinkedIn - Cloud SecurityLinks to an external site.