Assignment

Technical Report

Based on the scenario you find below, you are to write a technical report for the senior executive of the company you work in, evaluating different technologies to meet the company's networking requirements.

The rest of this specification is organised into two parts: 1) the scenario, which explains the situation of the (imaginary) company you work for, and 2) the instructions how you should approach this task.

1. Scenario

Your role / company overview: You work in the IT department of DataAnalytics AU, a start-up company that was spun out of Monash University with around 20 employees in Melbourne. The company is offering data analysis services, where customers can upload large data sets and access customised visual analyses through a web site.

Your company is growing fast, and the plan is to move into new offices within the next few months. You were hired as a user interface specialist, but when the CIO (Chief Information Officer) found out that you did FIT9135 as part of your Master's degree, she gave you the task to design the network infrastructure for the new offices.

Network requirements:

1. Up to now, the company was operating its own web server in a Monash data centre. The projected growth in customers and staff means that a dedicated, more powerful server will be required. The company is considering hosting its own servers or paying for an "on- demand computing platform" such as Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Linode etc.

2. The new office space is located in an old warehouse, and you need to decide what kind of local network infrastructure should be installed. In addition to potentially supporting the company servers, the local network infrastructure needs to support a dynamic work environment, where staff don't have assigned offices but move around with their laptops to work in small groups.

3. The new office space needs to be connected to the Internet.

Your task:

For the first requirement, your task is to do some research on the advantages and disadvantages of hosting your own server versus using online services. The second and third requirements are linked to the first one. If the company decides to host their own servers, that may have an impact on the required local network infrastructure and Internet connection.

Research and analysis expected in the report:

• The CIO wants to be informed about the options at a technical level. However, they expect you to give them enough arguments to also convince their investors, in particular with respect to costs and benefits of any new technology.

• Go into some technical detail to explain differences between technologies. It will be useful to create tables for some of the comparisons.

You can answer questions such as

o What devices are involved in each option and what are the ir functions?

o How does hosting your own servers compare to online platforms in terms of scalability, reliability, and up-front versus long-term costs?

o What kind of (wired and wireless) network technology should be installed in the new office space in order to facilitate the mobility of the staff?

o What are the available upstream and downstream capacities of different Internet providers? Is the technology scalable and future-proof, i.e., can we buy more capacity later without investing in expensive new hardware?

2. Instructions

Writing reports is an essential aspect of any IT career. You will be expected to deliver reports that are accurate and factual, that provide evidence for your findings, and that look professional.

Before you start

Before starting to write, think about your audience, i.e., who is reading the report? Don't write for your tutors. Write for your CIO and his team!

Sources and referencing

Any claims or recommendations that you make should substantiated with supporting references. That means that you cannot just claim that A is better than B, you have toargue why that is the case and point to external sources that can serve as evidence.

You can use the unit's textbook and other standard literature as sources, but you will also need to use additional documentation to find all the technical information and commercial details for this report.

Whenever you use material from an external source, make sure that you reference that source. You also need to assess the quality and reliability of the source - e.g., a company might say that their product is better than the competition's, but you cannot easily trust them. An independent expert review of different technologies is much more trustworthy.

Presentation

Your report should look professional, which means you need to pay attention to spelling, punctuation, grammar. It is important that your report has a clear structure. There is a strict word limit of 1200 words. Any text beyond the 1200 word limit is not marked. Text in references, figures and tables does not count towards the word limit.

You can find great tips on how to write a report on Monash's web pages. Here are a few links to get started.