Abstract, Problem, Purpose - drewwbikk/capstone GitHub Wiki

Abstract

In small to medium sized businesses, the utilization of cloud resources varies widely. Thus, research and deployment of a hybrid-cloud infrastructure is beneficial to many businesses of this size, both in terms of cost and data security/availability. This capstone will be an investigation into hybrid-cloud infrastructure and a proof-of-concept deployment of an enterprise hybrid-cloud environment for core IT infrastructure, so that businesses can utilize this exercise to help make their decision on how and when to expand into the cloud.

Problem

In smaller businesses, IT infrastructure is generally lacking. One of the biggest difficulties is knowing when and how to expand infrastructure, and whether the cloud is even worth looking into. Especially when the business has a limited IT department, this task can seem impossible. There is a great deal of information available regarding hybrid cloud solutions for large enterprises. But, for smaller businesses, there is a lack of resources about how to utilize cloud infrastructure, and there aren't any demonstrations of what a smaller enterprise cloud deployment might look like.

Purpose

The purpose of this capstone project is to leverage the knowledge learned about system administration and and infrastructure deployment from the program, and apply it to a real-world situation. This project provides context to the skills learned, and gives an opportunity to integrate skills learned in multiple classes together, to simulate how this knowledge can be used in the real world.

This capstone will also allow the researcher to explore technologies and services not covered in their program, such as different cloud service providers and modern file services and practices. Of particular interest is Amazon's AWS to integrate cloud services into an already-existing, on-premise enterprise infrastructure.