A healthcare enterprise needs to migrate 1.5\text{ PB} of historical medical imaging archi… — Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect

A healthcare enterprise needs to migrate $1.5\text{ PB}$ of historical medical imaging archives from an on-premises data center to Google Cloud Storage within a strict deadline of $30\text{ days}$ . The organization has an existing $1\text{ Gbps}$ Dedicated Interconnect link, but baseline daily operations consistently consume $80\%$ of its total bandwidth capacity. Corporate security governance mandates that all migrated data must be encrypted using Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK). Which data transfer strategy should you recommend to meet both the operational constraints and completion timeline?

Order GCP Transfer Appliance devices to perform an offline bulk data copy on-premises, ship the devices to Google for ingestion into Cloud Storage, and apply CMEK encryption during bucket setup.Answer
B
Configure Storage Transfer Service to perform an online data migration over the existing Dedicated Interconnect connection using parallel agent pools.
C
Provision multiple high-throughput HA VPN tunnels over the public internet to bypass the bandwidth constraints of the existing Dedicated Interconnect link.
D
Stage the dataset in public Cloud Storage buckets via gsutil over the internet, relying exclusively on IAM roles for data protection without configuring VPC Service Controls.

Answer

Order GCP Transfer Appliance devices to transfer the petabyte-scale data offline to Cloud Storage, and secure the ingested data using Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK).

For petabyte-scale datasets (

1.5\text{ PB}

) where usable network bandwidth is restricted to

200\text{ Mbps}

, online network transfer would take over 23 months. Utilizing Transfer Appliance allows secure offline capture and rapid physical delivery, satisfying both the 30-day migration timeframe and CMEK security compliance requirements.

Step-by-Step Solution

Calculate usable network bandwidth throughput for online transfer.

The usable bandwidth on the

1\text{ Gbps}

line is

20\%

, which equals

200\text{ Mbps}

(

25\text{ MB/s}

Baseline operational workloads take up

800\text{ Mbps}

of the available

1\text{ Gbps}

capacity.

Calculate time required to transfer

1.5\text{ PB}

over the network.

Transferring

1.5\text{ PB}

(

1,500,000\text{ GB}

) at

25\text{ MB/s}

requires approximately

60,000,000\text{ seconds}

694\text{ days}

Network-based online transfer cannot complete within the required

30\text{ day}

window.

Select the appropriate data migration product for offline petabyte-scale data.

Choose GCP Transfer Appliance, which physically ingests

1.5\text{ PB}

of data locally and is shipped directly to Google Cloud data centers for fast upload.

Transfer Appliance bypasses WAN bandwidth limitations and comfortably meets the 30-day timeline requirement while supporting CMEK integration.

Key Concept

Selecting between online network transfer (Storage Transfer Service) and offline physical transfer (Transfer Appliance) based on dataset size, available bandwidth, and completion timelines.

Question

Answer

Step-by-Step Solution

Key Concept

Common Mistakes

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