The Department of Spatial Information (DSI) is a State Government department. The major functions of DSI is to provide accurate and timely spatial information to other Government departments, but also to make some of this spatial information available to the public. In order to provide both the government and public services , DSI has developed a number of web services that deliver this information through a number of internally developed applications. This suite of web services and applications is referred to as the DSI Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS).
DSI have a number of new projects being developed that are expected to increase the demand for its spatial data dramatically. The Executive Management of DSI have looked at a number of proposals to support these new programs. The two alternatives they are investigating are:
1. Increasing the internal DSI Data Centre capacity to host and support the new projects in the OSDS. This would probably need a 50% increase in web infrastructure and support services within the Department. This would necessitate an increase in data centre infrastructure, server numbers as well as a major increase in the bandwidth available to DSI.
2. Migrating the OSDS to a Cloud provider. This would allow DSI to continue to develop and refine the data in its internal Maintenance systems and then move a copy of the completed data to the cloud-based Delivery system for publication.
DSI Management is planning to adopt Proposal 2 but have asked you to give them a report that looks at the following aspects of the
proposal:
1. What model should DSI adopt for a cloud-based OSDS?
2. How should DSI assess the risk of adopting a cloud-based OSDS?
3. What steps should DSI take to provide adequate security for the OSDS?