Chapter 3 Quiz: Migration to the Cloud

Fictional Corp has grown exponentially over the first few years of its existence. Until now it had been using commercial off-the-shelf software. They've decided to create a development team and need to decide what the best method of development management is. Which of the following are the two most common methods that they might choose from?

Agile: Agile is one of the two most common methods used for project management and software development that allows for multiple smaller changes to occur simultaneously rather than one large phase after another. Waterfall: Waterfall is one of the two most common methods used for project management and software development. It requires one phase of development to be completed before the next can begin.

Fictional Corp uses a process to provide oversight to the development, maintenance, and retirement of programs that the company creates and uses internally. Which of the following would best describe this oversight and process?

Application life cycle management: Application life cycle management provides oversight to the development, maintenance, and retirement of programs and applications.

Fictional Corp wants to examine systems within their data center to determine how they operate under normal conditions and determine what resources would be necessary to be provisioned on a cloud service provider if they were to make that transition. Which of the following describes the records that Fictional Corp is looking to review?

Baselines: Baselines are a record of how a system operates under normal conditions.

Bob has received a change request that now needs to be analyzed at the next regular meeting to determine whether or not the change should be implemented. Which of the following teams is responsible for reviewing this change and either giving it their approval or denying it?

CAB: The change advisory board is responsible for analyzing and then approving or denying change requests.

Fictional Corp has recently implemented a change management process where a group of employees, through regular meetings, must approve or deny the changes that are proposed through a formalized process. What is the name of the team of employees that is responsible for approving or denying the requested changes?

CAB: The change advisory board should meet at regular intervals to discuss proposed changes and either approve or deny them.

Ward has been hired by Fictional Corp to manage the IT infrastructure group. One of the first questions he asks is how they keep track of all of the information about their servers, operating systems, networking gear, and applications. He is answered that some people have some of the information in spreadsheets, but that there appear to be different versions of that spreadsheet floating around. Which of the following might he decide to implement?

CMDB: A configuration management database is a system that can be used to track information such as the configuration and maintenance of the hardware and software that make up the IT infrastructure.

George has completed the implementation of a new change to one of the virtual machines on the CSP they use that runs a few of the company's applications. He went back through and compared the results to the original approved request and determined that the change was successful. What is the next step that George should perform?

Change documentation: Change documentation is something that should be done at every step of the process, but it is also the last part of the process as well. Various documents and systems, including the configuration management database, need to be updated and stored somewhere that they can be referenced later.

Cara has requested some modifications to one of the cloud applications that the company developed internally. She pulled up the internal tracking application and sees that it has just gone through the change assessment phase. What is the next phase of the change management process that it should be in now?

Change implementation: After the change has been assessed and approved, it should move into the implementation phase.

One of the sales managers has approached the development team to ask for some changes to one of the web applications that his team uses. He made some great suggestions, but the development team manager told him they can't just make those changes without going through the formalized process. Which of the following should the development manager ask the sales manager for?

Change request: A change request is a document that formally states what change is being requested and why.

Robert has just finished implementing a change that was approved by the change advisory board. After the change has been implemented, which of the following is the next step that should be performed?

Change review: A change review is what happens after the implementation to verify that the change has been implemented correctly.

Cato has received an email stating that the change that he requested has been completed and the tracking ticket associated with the change has been closed. Cato pulls up the cloud application to see the new features that he had requested but is disappointed to see that they aren't quite what had been described in the change request. Which of the following steps, or phases, of the change management process were omitted?

Change review: A change review should have been completed after implementation to ensure that the change was implemented correctly compared to the change request.

Widgets Inc. is a startup and looking to manage their own hardware and software. They know that procuring real estate to build their own data center can take a few months and do not have that kind of time built into their schedule. Which of the following would allow them to build their own private cloud on their own hardware with the potential to migrate into their own data center later if need be?

Colocation: A colocation facility would allow Widgets Inc. to rent out space to install their own servers or racks of servers where they can manage the hardware and software.

Frank has just been hired as the new development manager at Widget Co. He was hired because he proposed that he could implement new methods such as one where new changes are deployed in small increments every 24 hours. Some of the team members don't quite understand it though, so he recommended they go read up on it. What search term would help them find the information they need to learn more about this method?

Continuous delivery: Continuous delivery is a practice where changes are deployed in small increments on a short time schedule, such as every 24 hours, rather than being delayed for larger, less frequent updates.

Fictional Corp has previously had a release schedule where changes were released into production on the first and third Saturday every month. However, it has been suggested that it would be more efficient to push the changes to production as soon as the code has passed testing. Which of the following methodologies is being suggested?

Continuous deployment: Continuous deployment is the practice that deploys new code as soon as it passes testing, rather than waiting for a scheduled release.

Fictional Corp is in the process of migrating applications and data from their on-premises physical servers to a cloud service provider. They have migrated the application code successfully, but now must move the underlying database servers. Which of the following might be the biggest concern with migrating the database servers?

Data integrity: The biggest concern with moving large databases is typically data integrity, making sure that all of the records transfer and transfer correctly.

Thomas has been tasked with implementing automation wherever possible. He starts to work on the first system where he knows automation would greatly benefit the company. What is one of the first things he should do before implementing the automation?

Design a workflow: Before even creating a change request, it would be helpful to design the workflow and steps required to document in the change request. A change request may not even be required since Thomas has already been tasked with automating these systems.

Jason is working on a Saturday afternoon and has determined that a newly discovered vulnerability affects a group of servers that contain critical data for the company. The operating system manufacturer has released a fix overnight, but the company's change management processes require approval before patching any of the systems. Which group could possibly give Jason an approval on a weekend outside of their normally scheduled meetings?

ECAB: An emergency change advisory board can provide a quick approval when needed for emergency changes that cannot wait for the next regularly scheduled meeting of the normal change advisory board.

Gary is creating a new virtual machine that needs to be closely monitored during its first few months of activity as the application that it is hosting is brand new and he's not sure what to expect out of it. Which of the following should he ensure is done to make sure that logs are collected in as much detail as possible?

Enable auditing: When auditing is enabled, it should allow the system to log events in as much detail as possible for further analysis later.

A large international organization currently has a single support desk that operates 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. However, they have realized that for disaster planning purposes, it would be a good idea to have multiple support desks in different locations so that if one went down the others could take over for it. Normal operations, though, would mean that they didn't have to staff any of the operations overnight. Which of the following has the company decided to use as the new model for their support desk?

FTS: A follow-the-sun (FTS) model may be used by organizations who want redundancy in their operations while also reducing the normal day-to-day dependency on any one location.

Fictional Corp is trying to choose a cloud service provider. There are many things to consider, and they have narrowed the choices down to two CSPs that could meet their technical needs. Which of the following might they also consider doing before signing any contracts or creating an account on those platforms?

Have the various agreements reviewed by the legal department: The legal department may be able to spot certain things in the agreements that could be of concern to the organization. It is best to have them review any contracts or agreements before signing anything or agreeing to terms and conditions by creating an account.

Bill is trying to create a new web application to replace an existing system that is becoming outdated. The old application has been modified a number of times and the code has become rather convoluted over time, so he has decided to start over. However, the application that it is replacing needs to be usable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year with as little downtime as possible. Which of the following would be the type of system Bill is trying to create by adding in redundancy wherever he can?

High availability: High availability is the idea that a system should have a very high percentage uptime during which the system, resource, or network functions reliably.

Fictional Corp currently has a data center that is not taking advantage of any virtualization technologies. They have decided that it is time to start looking at migrating to the cloud and depending less on their own data center. However, they have read that even the major cloud providers occasionally have outages that prevent them from meeting the 99.999 percent uptime that Fictional Corp needs, even if that isn't specified in the SLA of the major providers. Which of the following cloud solutions might best fit Fictional Corp's needs? (Choose two)

Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud could help Fictional Corp meet their uptime requirements, though it may be better to use a multi-cloud environment instead of depending on the capabilities of Fictional Corp's data center and the private cloud that they would have to build out as part of the hybrid cloud. Multi-cloud: A multi-cloud infrastructure would mean an outage at one cloud provider should not affect the availability of their systems. However, this would also potentially be rather expensive, but sometimes the costs are justified if the uptime requirements are very necessary.

The Chief Technology Officer of an organization just got back from a technology conference where he learned about a set of best practices that many other organizations have put into place to help them be more efficient with their operations. Some of the topics covered by these best practices include change management and systems that store maintenance and configuration information for systems. He has determined that he wants everyone in his organization trained and up to speed on at least the foundational level of knowledge of these practices. What is the topic that the managers in IT should begin looking for training on?

ITIL: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of best practices that organizations can implement to help improve the efficiency of delivering services to their users and/or customers.

Kevin has created a web application that will reside on the cloud service provider's platform that his company uses. However, the database for the application must reside on the company's private cloud in their data center. Which of the following might be a primary concern when running connectivity tests?

Latency: Since the application server and database server providing the back end are in two different geographical locations, latency is most likely the primary concern. The application on the cloud has to query the database server in the data center for information and then render that information and deliver it to the user. That's a lot of network connections from beginning to end of each call to the application.

A social video sharing platform has grown quite popular in the United States and has decided to expand to Europe. They want to open a second data center there as part of their expansion. Which of the following is perhaps one of the biggest pieces of the expansion that they want to consider a part of the data storage strategies?

Legal restrictions: Individual countries have different data storage laws and regulations. The company needs to be very familiar with what the laws are before building out any infrastructure or storing data there.

Daphne is trying to log into her company's cloud-based email system, but is getting an error message. Upon logging into the administrative portal, it appears the credit card on file has expired. Which of the following seems to be the issue?

Licensing outage: If the credit card on file with the cloud provider has expired, most likely all of the licenses will go inactive, causing issues with errors logging in.

Jeff has a dashboard application that can give him an at-a-glance look at the various virtual machines on his cloud infrastructure. He notices that one of the systems is showing memory usage at 95 percent. Which of the following types of testing has possibly been overlooked for that system?

Load testing: If load testing had been performed on this system, they might have found where the system was not properly configured for auto scaling, thus making it use up large amounts of memory on the current system.

Kathryn has been tasked with migrating several on-premises applications that currently reside on servers in the company's data center to a cloud service provider. As part of the process she has taken images from the local systems and put them onto the CSP's platform and now wants to run some tests to determine how well the environment auto-scales as demand increases. Which of the following best describes the type of testing she is performing at this stage of the migration?

Load testing: Load testing is the process of pushing a system beyond its normal workload conditions to determine how well it adapts to higher demands.

A large e-commerce platform sells and ships millions of dollars' worth of goods every day. Which of the following concepts is most likely the most important thing for them to consider in the design of their IT infrastructure?

Minimizing downtime: For every minute that a very large e-commerce site is down, they stand to lose a lot of money. Thus, they typically build their IT infrastructure with high availability in mind.

A large Fortune 500 company has a data center full of servers and wants to move 5 petabytes worth of data to a cloud service provider. Having run some calculations, it could take years to move all of this data to a cloud service provider. Which of the following does the company most likely need to consider in order to complete this migration in a timely manner?

Offline transfer: Cloud service providers have multiple means of offline transfer so that you can move very large sets of data from your own data center to the cloud service provider. Companies don't want to wait years for their data to transfer to the cloud provider.

Allen has been tasked with the design, development, and optimization of automation processes. Which of the following is the term that could be used to describe his current set of tasks?

Orchestration: Orchestration is the design, development, and optimization of automation processes.

Jan has just migrated a virtual machine from the company's private cloud to the cloud service provider his company uses. He wants to see how the system responds as well as compare the original and new baselines. What type of testing should he perform?

Performance testing: Jan can use performance testing to determine how the system responds and compare the original and new baselines.

Niles manages his company's private cloud. His manager wants to start taking advantage of the benefits that resources of a cloud service provider can offer. However, upon starting to try and get his company's local Active Directory to authenticate users on the public cloud resources, he can't seem to get it working. Which of the following is the most likely issue?

Platform integration issue: Since Niles is having issues integrating the private cloud with the public cloud resources, this appears to be a platform integration issue.

Fictional Corp has decided to outsource the development of a cloud application that it wants to have developed for its sales department to use. Which of the following might the company use to solicit bids for the project?

RFP: A request for proposal is a document that lays out the terms by which the job should be completed and invites vendors to propose their ideas on how to meet those terms.

Fictional Corp has been using their current cloud service provider for the past year. They have been mostly happy with the service provided up until about a month ago when various virtual machines started becoming unavailable for hours at a time. The CSP has a guarantee of a 99.999 percent uptime, which means they should only have about 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. Which of the following defines the guarantee the CSP is not meeting?

SLA: The service level agreement defines the uptime that a provider is guaranteeing to deliver to their customers.

Jeff has just been hired by Fictional Corp as a systems administrator. He is told that one of his responsibilities is going to be the backup processes used for on-premises systems in the company's data center. He is told about documentation that he should use to make sure that everything is done correctly. What type of documentation was he referred to?

SOPs: Standard operating procedures are used to define the steps necessary to carry out various processes.

Faith has been tasked with migrating as many systems as possible to the cloud. She has a list of the systems that the IT department is aware of, but has heard employees talking about other systems that are not on her list. Which of the following might describe the systems that she still needs to gather information about?

Shadow IT: The term shadow IT is used to describe IT resources or systems in an organization that were not submitted to formal approval processes and likely exist outside the knowledge or oversight of the IT department.

Fictional Corp has several scripts that can be copied and pasted into their cloud service provider's platform to create new virtual machines with certain specifications. After one of the administrators runs one of the scripts, she goes through and verifies that everything was set up correctly, only to find that certain things were not set up correctly. Which of the following is the most likely issue?

Template misconfiguration: Templates are used to create new virtual machines based upon a standard configuration so that when a new one is needed, the administrator doesn't need to spend a lot of time installing and configuring the system. They typically look like a script with lines of text describing what should be done according to the language required by the cloud service provider.

Frasier is comparing the logs from the firewall to the logs on the web server after a security incident. He is trying to correlate the events, but it appears that the traffic took several minutes to reach the web server from the firewall for each of the various attempts. Which of the following could be the issue?

Time synchronization: If the logs on one system are consistently off by several minutes from the logs of another system, most likely there is a time synchronization issue. Either one of the systems is getting the time from an incorrect source, or it has been some time since the last synchronization, allowing one system to drift several minutes off from the actual time.

Martin has been asked to look for weaknesses within the company's cloud infrastructure and create a report to be delivered to upper management. He is not to actually try and exploit any of the weaknesses found to determine to what extent they might compromise the system. Which of the following has Martin been asked to do?

Vulnerability testing: Vulnerability testing is the process of identifying security weaknesses in various systems without actually testing them via exploitation.