Kiawi Research conducts agricultural research and sells the results to the agriculture and food industries. The company uses a combination of on-premises and third-party server clusters to meet its storage needs. Kiawi Research has seasonal demands on its services, with up to 50 percent drops in data capacity and bandwidth demand during low-demand periods. They plan to host their websites in an agile, cloud environment where the company can deploy and remove its websites based on its business requirements rather than the requirements of the hosting company. 

 A recent fire near the datacenter that Kiawi Research uses raises the management team's awareness of the vulnerability of hosting all of the company's websites and data at any single location. The management team is concerned about protecting its data from loss as a result of a disaster. 

 Websites 

Kiawi Research has a portfolio of 300 websites and associated background processes that are currently hosted in a third-party datacenter. All of the websites are written in ASP.NET, and the background processes use Windows Services. The hosting environment costs Kiawi Research approximately $25 million in hosting and maintenance fees. 

 Infrastructure 

Kiawi Research also has on-premises servers that run VMs to support line-of-business applications. The company wants to migrate the line-of-business applications to the cloud, one application at a time. The company is migrating most of its production VMs from an aging VMWare ESXi farm to a Hyper-V cluster that runs on Windows Server 2019. 

 Applications DistributionTracking 

Kiawi Research has a web application named Distribution tracking. This application constantly collects real time data that tracks worldwide distribution points to customer retail sites. This data is available to customers at all times. 

The company wants to ensure that the distribution tracking data is stored at a location that is geographically close to the customers who will be using the information. The system must continue running in the event of VM failures without corrupting data. The system is processor intensive and should be run in a multithreading environment. 

 HRApp 

The company has a human resources (HR) application named HRApp that stores data in an onpremises SQL Server database. The database must have at least two copies, but data to support backups and business continuity must stay in Kiawi Research locations only. The data must remain on-premises and cannot be stored in the cloud. HRApp was written by a third party, and the code cannot be modified. The human resources data is used by all business offices, and each office requires access to the entire database. Users report that HRApp takes all night to generate the required payroll reports, and they would like to reduce this time.

 Metrics Tracking 

Kiawi Research has an application named MetricsTracking that is used to track analytics for the 

DistributionTracking web application. The data MetricsTracking collects is not customer facing. 

Data is stored on an on-premises SQL Server database, but this data should be moved to the cloud. Employees at other locations access this data by using a remote desktop connection to connect to the application, but latency issues degrade the functionality. Kiawi Research wants a solution that allows remote employees to access metrics data without using a remote desktop connection. MetricsTracking was written in-house, and the development team is available to make modifications to the application if necessary. However, the company wants to continue to use SQL Server for MetricsTracking. 

 Business Requirements Business Continuity 

You have the following requirements: 

• Move all customer-facing data to the cloud. 
• Web servers should be backed up to geographically separate locations, 
• If one website becomes unavailable, customers should automatically be routed to websites that are still operational. 
• Data must be available regardless of the operational status of any particular website. 
• The HRApp system must remain on-premises and must be backed up. 
• The MetricsTracking data must be replicated so that it is locally available to all Kiawi Research offices. 

            

Auditing and Security 

You have the following requirements: 

• Both internal and external consumers should be able to access research results. 
• Internal users should be able to access data by using their existing company credentials without requiring multiple logins. 
• Consumers should be able to access the service by using their Microsoft credentials. 
• Applications written to access the data must be authenticated.      Access and activity must be monitored and audited. 

 Storage and Processing 

You have the following requirements: 

• Provide real-time distribution tracking data by geographic location. 
• Collect and store large datasets in real-time data for customer use. 
• Locate the distribution tracking data as close to the central office as possible to improve bandwidth. 
• Co-locate the distribution tracking data as close to the customer as possible based on the customer's location. 
• Data in the cloud must be stored in geographically separate locations, but kept with the same political boundaries. 

 Technical Requirements Migration 

You have the following requirements: 

Deploy all websites to Azure. 

Replace on-premises and third-party physical server clusters with cloud-based solutions. 

Business Continuity 

Data must be backed up to separate geographic locations. 

Web servers must run concurrent versions of all websites in distinct geographic locations. 

Use Azure to back up the on-premises Metrics Tracking data. 

Use Azure virtual machines as a recovery platform for MetricsTracking and HRApp. 

Ensure that there is at least one additional on-premises recovery environment for the HRApp. 

 

QUESTION: 

Kiawi Research has hired you as the main Azure solution architect for this project. Discuss what solutions you will implement to address the above customer.