1. Management summary of response

The proposed solution is based on using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Managed services like BigQuery offers advanced analytics and the Prediction API provides scoring. Google Cloud Platform enables customers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure.

The GCP is built for large scale processing, and is a proven platform to handle billions of entities and terabytes of data. It is designed to scale like Google’s own products, even when you experience a huge traffic spike. Managed services such as BigQuery or Cloud Datastore give you auto-scaling that enables your application to grow with your users. Just as GCP allows you to scale-up, managed services also scale down. You don’t pay for computing resources that you don’t need.

The cloud has reached a tipping point, and is rapidly becoming the industry standard for deploying and running applications and services. Cloud providers are outpacing traditional vendors and internal operations organizations in all areas, including security, availability, elasticity, functionality and cost effectiveness. Google has one of the largest and most advanced computer networks and one of the largest - as well as one of the greenest - data center infrastructures among the world’s companies.

A significant benefit of using Software-as-a-Service is that the customer does not have to invest in hardware, infrastructure, operations or platform maintenance. You pay only for what you use, and you pay as you go. Furthermore, domain experts can focus solely on functionality and behavior of their applications.

This gives the NTA the flexibility of experimenting, iterating and learning, testing hypothesis and evolving applications continuously. As there is no up front cost, failing and trying alternative approaches is virtually free. When required, the Google Cloud Platform services will scale on demand. This adds up to a substantially reduced overall risk for the NTA. The cost and consequence of failure is low, while the probability of success using GCP proven services is high.