Assignment: Database Management

Problem 1.

For each of the situations described below, indicate which of the following security measures is most appropriate:

• Authorization rules
• Encryption
• Authentication schemes

a) A national brokerage firm uses an electronic funds transfer (EFT) system to transmit sensitive finance data between locations.

b) An organization has set up an offsite computer-based training center. The organization wishes to restrict access to the site to authorized employees. Because each employee's use of the center is occasional, the center does not wish to provide the employees with keys to access the center.

c) A manufacturing firm uses a simple password system to protect its database but finds it needs a more comprehensive system to grant different privileges (e.g., read, versus create or update) to different users.

d) A university has experienced considerable difficulty with unauthorized users accessing files and databases by appropriating passwords from legitimate users.

Problem 2

An e-business operates a high-volume catalog sales center. Using clustered servers and mirrored disk drives, the data center has been able to achieve data availability of 99.5 percent. Although this exceeds industry norms, the organization still receives periodic customer complaints that the Web site is unavailable (due to data outages). A vendor has proposed several software upgrades as well as expanded disk capacity to improve data availability. The cost of these proposed improvements would be about 550,000 per month. The vendor estimates that the improvements should improve availability to 99.99 percent.

a) If this company is typical for a catalog sales center, what is the current annual cost of system unavailability? (You will need to refer to Tables 12-2 and 12-3 shown below to answer this question.)

b) If the vendor's estimates are accurate, can the organization justify the additional expenditure?

Problem 3

The mail order firm described in Problem 2 has about 1 million customers. The firm is planning a mass mailing of its spring sales catalog to all its customers. The unit cost of the mailing (postage and catalog) is $6.00. The error rate in the database (duplicate records, erroneous addresses, etc.) is estimated to be 12 Percent. Calculate the expected loss of this mailing due to poor quality data.

Problem 4

The average annual revenue per customer for the mail order firm described in Problem2 and 3 is $100. The organization is planning a data quality improvement program that it hopes will increase the average revenue per customer by 5 percent per year. If this estimate proves accurate, what will be the annual increase in revenue due to improved quality?

TABLE 12-2 Cost of Downtime, by Type of Business

TABLE 12-3 Cost of Downtime, by Availability