The name of our fictitious company is The Financial Company. The Financial Company is neither small nor big. We will not give you any indication of the size of this company because we do not want you to take our example setup as being optimized for a company of a particular size, although we will provide some rough sizing guidelines later.
As with many other companies, The Financial Company tries to keep up with modern techniques within their IT infrastructure and is greatly concerned with unauthorized security issues. They are a big fan of Microsoft and live by the following principle:
If Microsoft has a product that can do it, let's try that one first.
The concept of cloud computing is still somewhat fuzzy to them, and they do not yet know how or when they will be using it. They do understand that in the near future, this technology will be an important factor for them, so they have decided that for every new system or function that needs to be implemented, they will take cloud computing into account.