Your company, Northwind Traders – a food and beverage distribution company – is rapidly expanding. Northwind needs more cost-effective, scalable means to manage your day-to-day transactional data needs. Your internal management team has been tasked with proposing cloud-based solutions to expand Northwind’s operations.
Some initial exploration has led you to Amazon Web Services (AWS), but you are still uncertain about the specifics of your solution and needs. You’ve saved these pages to review again (the following are links to the pages on the AWS site):
What is AWS? (Links to an external site.)
AWS Solutions Library (Links to an external site.)
AWS Architecture Center (Links to an external site.)
Here is some important information about your company, Northwind Traders:
Northwind currently employs about 30 people, but you may need to expand as your customer base grows. You currently serve almost 90 customer accounts across 21 countries, with plans to move into four more by the end of this time next year, based on your current action plans and forecasting
Northwind’s current data needs are mostly structured, transactional data. In the future you may need to move toward a big data and real-time analytics platform, but that is not in your immediate (6-8 month) forecasting
Northwind’s leaders have plans within the next two years to enhance the mobile/tablet application to give ease of management to your customer accounts, automate elements of your sales process, and enhance your data integrations into point of sale (POS) systems
Assignment
Given the scenario, draft a memo to your company’s leadership. The purpose of this memo is to make a decision between the three cloud services to which you have narrowed your search. It is important to not only make a decision, but to also defend that decision.
Create a Microsoft Word or Google Docs document using a Business Letter/Memo template (how to do this in Word and how to do this in Google Docs). In this letter/memo include the following:
Your choice of cloud services to meet your company’s immediate needs (6-12 months)
A minimum of five (5) substantive reasons why this is your choice
Employ evidence from the scenario, from AWS’s site resources, and other third party sources to enhance the defense of your choice
Make sure to fully cite any sources you use
Two (2) proposed future scenarios to be employed once this existing choice (from #1) is in place
Leverage evidence to support your decision and cite any sources you use
Think of this as a roadmap extending beyond your initial solution offering
Plan for the next five (5) years
Use of proper, professional language, tone, and grammar
Consider this a business proposal that would be turned in to your company’s upper management
