Case Study - Company Overview - HipLocal is a community application designed to facilitate communication between people in close proximity.
It is used for event planning and organizing sporting events, and for businesses to connect with their local communities.
HipLocal launched recently in a few neighborhoods in Dallas and is rapidly growing into a global phenomenon.
Its unique style of hyper-local community communication and business outreach is in demand around the world.
Executive Statement - We are the number one local community app; it's time to take our local community services global.
Our venture capital investors want to see rapid growth and the same great experience for new local and virtual communities that come online, whether their members are 10 or 10000 miles away from each other.
Solution Concept - HipLocal wants to expand their existing service, with updated functionality, in new regions to better serve their global customers.
They want to hire and train a new team to support these regions in their time zones.
They will need to ensure that the application scales smoothly and provides clear uptime data.
Existing Technical Environment - HipLocal's environment is a mix of on-premises hardware and infrastructure running in Google Cloud Platform.
The HipLocal team understands their application well, but has limited experience in global scale applications.
Their existing technical environment is as follows: " Existing APIs run on Compute Engine virtual machine instances hosted in GCP.
" State is stored in a single instance MySQL database in GCP.
" Data is exported to an on-premises Teradata/Vertica data warehouse.
" Data analytics is performed in an on-premises Hadoop environment.
" The application has no logging.
" There are basic indicators of uptime; alerts are frequently fired when the APIs are unresponsive.
Business Requirements - HipLocal's investors want to expand their footprint and support the increase in demand they are seeing.
Their requirements are: " Expand availability of the application to new regions.
" Increase the number of concurrent users that can be supported.
" Ensure a consistent experience for users when they travel to different regions.
" Obtain user activity metrics to better understand how to monetize their product.
" Ensure compliance with regulations in the new regions (for example, GDPR)
" Reduce infrastructure management time and cost.
" Adopt the Google-recommended practices for cloud computing.
Technical Requirements - " The application and backend must provide usage metrics and monitoring.
" APIs require strong authentication and authorization.
" Logging must be increased, and data should be stored in a cloud analytics platform.
" Move to serverless architecture to facilitate elastic scaling.
" Provide authorized access to internal apps in a secure manner.
Which service should HipLocal use to enable access to internal apps?
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.D.
https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/cloud-iap-for-on-prem-apps-overviewTo provide authorized access to internal apps in a secure manner, HipLocal should use Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP).
Cloud IAP is a service that provides secure and authenticated access to applications and resources hosted on Google Cloud Platform. It allows administrators to control access to applications and resources based on the identity of the user or the group they belong to.
With Cloud IAP, administrators can define access policies that control who can access an application, based on factors such as user identity, device security status, and location. Access to applications can be restricted to specific users or groups, and can be configured to require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for additional security.
Cloud IAP provides a number of benefits for HipLocal. First, it allows the company to provide secure access to internal apps without requiring a VPN. This reduces the complexity of the network and makes it easier to manage. Additionally, Cloud IAP provides granular access controls that can be tailored to specific user roles or groups. This helps ensure that users only have access to the resources they need to do their job, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.
Furthermore, Cloud IAP integrates with Google Cloud's Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which allows administrators to manage user access to resources across Google Cloud Platform. This integration provides a unified view of user access across multiple services, making it easier to manage and audit user access.
In conclusion, Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) is the best option for HipLocal to enable access to internal apps in a secure manner, given its capabilities for providing granular access controls, multi-factor authentication, and integration with Google Cloud's IAM service.