Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification: 1. Designing for Business Requirements - Important Things To Know

The first stages of a cloud project should begin with understanding the business use cases and product strategy. This information sets the context for later work on the technical requirements analysis.
One part of business requirements analysis includes application design and cost considerations. Application design considerations include assessing the possible use of managed services and preemptible virtual machines. Data lifecycle management is also a factor in application design.
In addition to business drivers, consider regulations that may apply to your projects. Many regulations are designed to protect individuals’ privacy or to ensure the integrity of data to prevent fraud. Compliance with regulations may require additional security controls or application features that otherwise would not be implemented.
Security business requirements can be framed around three objectives: protecting confidentiality, preserving the integrity of data, and ensuring the availability of services, especially with respect to malicious acts that could disrupt services.
Business and other organizations will often monitor the progress of projects and the efficiency and profitability of lines of business using success measures, such as KPIs and ROI.
 

1. Study the three case studies: Dress4Win, Mountkirk Games, and TerramEarth. You will have access to the case studies during the exam, but you can save time if you are already familiar with the details of each. Also, think through the implications of the business requirements in order to understand how they constrain technical solution options.
2. Understand business terms like total cost of ownership (TCO), key performance indicators (KPIs), and return on investment (ROI). You will almost certainly not have to calculate any of these measures, but you should understand what they measure and why they are used by business executives and analysts.
3. Learn about Google Cloud Platform managed services and for what purposes they are used. These services can be used instead of deploying and managing applications and managing servers, storage, networking, and so forth. If a business requirement includes using managed services or reducing the workload on a DevOps team, you may be able to use one or more of these services to solve problems presented on the exam.
4. Understand the elements of data management. This includes how much data will be collected and stored, how long it will be stored, what processing will be applied to it, and who will have access to it.
5. Understand how compliance with regulations can introduce additional business requirements. Businesses and organizations may be subject to one or more regulations. Part of analyzing business requirements is to understand which, if any, regulations require compliance.
6. Understand the three main aspects of security with respect to business requirements. They are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality focuses on limiting access to data to those who have a legitimate business need for it. Integrity ensures that data is not tampered with or corrupted in ways that could enable fraud or other misuse. Availability addresses the need to prevent malicious acts from disrupting access to services.
7. Know why decision-makers use success measures. Two well-known success measures are KPIs and ROI. KPIs are measures that are specific to a business operation. ROI is a general measure based on the cost of an investment versus the additional benefit realized because of that investment.