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 handles 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 2 Task
Having conducted the options evaluation and established whether Wrexham Food & Home will adopt cloud services and if so, what cloud services, your task for assignment 2 is to prepare a report covering the following:
• A cloud migration plan listing the steps and sequence with which the migration will be conducted.
• Potential challenges that the company could encounter in the migration.
• Security risks and a brief plan to mitigate the risks.
• Cloud disaster recovery and business continuity plan including justified back up considerations.
• Recommended architecture for future application development leveraging cloud platforms.
• Recommendations about how the business could adopt and leverage IoT
Please make sure that you correctly cite and reference all secondary sources you use, and include a reference list. The reference list will not be included in your final word count.
