Question

A pharmaceutical company is designing a new clinical trial data platform on Google Cloud. The business stakeholders state three non-negotiable requirements: the solution must reduce operational reporting effort by 40% within the first year (a success metric tied to ROI), all research data must remain queryable for regulatory audits for at least 10 years, and the platform must demonstrate measurable cost predictability to the finance team each quarter. The architect must produce a design that explicitly maps these business requirements to verifiable outcomes. Which approach best ensures the design can be validated against these stated business requirements?

Accepted Answer

Define quantifiable success metrics and KPIs for each business requirement (e.g., reporting hours saved, data retention duration, committed spend variance), then tie each to a specific measurable service capability and reporting mechanism in the design.

Answer

Prioritize selecting the highest-performing compute and storage tiers so the platform exceeds all requirements, deferring metric definition until after the platform is in production.

Answer

Focus the design document on the technical HA and scalability architecture, since meeting availability targets will naturally satisfy the business's cost and reporting goals.

Answer

Adopt a fully serverless architecture across all tiers, because serverless inherently guarantees cost predictability, reduces operational effort, and satisfies retention needs automatically.