Assignment Instructions

Scenario

You work for a company that holds an annual capture the flag (CTF) competition. In the past, competitions had at least 1,500 people competing against one another. There are 250 challenges in the system ranging from general IT to cybersecurity. There is no way to know exactly how long it takes participants to perform a challenge; however, on average, some investigations have determined between 30 seconds to 1 minute. The system must stay up during the competition. It is estimated that each year the number of participants will grow 15%. It has been decided that in the upcoming year, the system will be delivered to contestants from the Cloud as Software as a Service (SaaS) instead of an on-premise system. The main reason for this is that a power outage occurred last year, and the system was not operational for 4 hours during the 72-hour event. Management does not want that to happen again.

You work in a small IT team, and your director of IT asked your team to research Amazon and Microsoft for the CTF system. Facebook developed the CTF system, is open source, and runs on Ubuntu. You will also determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the two providers.

Assignment Requirements

You will work in a group for this assignment. First, research the two cloud providers Amazon and Microsoft and provide background information as to why you picked the two you did. The background information should be at least 500 words.