Abstract

Supply chain issues have affected the world in ways that have never been seen before Covid-19. From extended wait times to a lack of material, the supply chain has shown the world that it cannot handle being misaligned for even the smallest amount of time. Due to the pendulum swinging and no certainty of when the hardware will be delivered, cloud computing presents itself as a powerful solution. Our capstone will attempt to implement a hybrid-cloud solution into our IT division to maximize our capacity and efficiency as well as bring up-to-date tech to the students.

Problem

Upgrading an existing infrastructure can be a difficult task to manage. When looking at purchasing new technology, understanding how it will work with the existing infrastructure is critical. Aside from the time spent on researching, there will need to be time spent implementing the new hardware; taking out old hardware, and replacing it with the new, which may cause potential downtime as well as time spent on verification. On top of this lengthy and tedious process, the wait time for the hardware is another major factor to include. With the supply chain still recovering from 2019, wait times for hardware have increased significantly along with availability dropping for a lot of resources. With all of these factors combined, implementing or managing on-prem hardware requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. Time and effort that not every professor has at Champlain college to spend on keeping cyber.local running.

Purpose

The purpose of this capstone is to implement a hybrid-cloud solution for cyber.local, alleviating stress for the faculty in regard to managing hardware, and bringing new technology to Champlain College. The knowledge that students could gain from enveloping themselves in a cloud infrastructure could potentially propel Champlain College's widely respected cyber division even further. The students will gain perspectives of multiple virtual solutions such as vCenter and AWS, giving them the opportunity to expand their knowledge beyond physical constraints.