Review the case study listed below. Respond to the questions below in a 4-6 page Word document:

Interconnect-Communications is a company that provides network equipment to telecommunications industries across the globe. Over the years, Interconnect-Communications has grown considerably and their product portfolio has expanded to accommodate several acquisitions, including companies that specialize 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 looking for ways to increase its competitiveness and efficiency by taking advantage of new technologies, especially those that can assist in cost reduction.

Technical Infrastructure and Environment

Interconnect-Communications various 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 an increase in 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 serious obstruction and became a source of 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 unfortunately 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 a possibility 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 a true consolidation model. However, subsequent to their initial inquiries they became overwhelmed by the plenitude of cloud providers and cloud-based products to help understand what this strategy would fundamentally look like.

Roadmap and Implementation Strategy

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

A preliminary cloud computing adoption roadmap is discussed to address a number of key points:

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

Business Benefits ATN needs to evaluate which of the 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 need to be realized to promote business value.

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

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

ATN fears that 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 existing 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 who are well recognized for their 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 factors, such as 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-Communications 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, 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 that were running on different technologies over to a PaaS platform. Based on positive results and feedback received for the prototype project, Interconnect-Communications decides to embark on a strategic initiative to garner similar benefits for other areas of the company.

Answer the following questions in a substantive manner:

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

2. 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)

3. 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)