Part A: Mini Case Study

You are to provide an essay (two pages maximum) for the following mini case question from the textbook.

Computer Dynamics

Computer Dynamics is a microcomputer software development company that has a 300 + computer network. The company is located in three adjacent five-story buildings in an office park, with about 100 computers in each building. The LANs in each building are similar, but one building has the data canter on the second floor. There are no other office locations. The current network is poorly designed for its current needs and must be completely replaced. Develop a logical design for this enterprise campus that considers the seven network architecture components. There are no other campuses, so you can omit WAN access. You will need to make some assumptions, so be sure to document your assumptions and explain why you have designed the network in this way.

The essays do not require in text references or a list of references.

Part B Hands on

You will need access to a networked computer with access to the PING, ARP and TRACEROUTE tool. For some of the activity if you have a restrictive firewall you will need to search for a looking glass type services and modify your report accordingly (search Google for looking glass tools). The exercise has a number of activities for you to perform, but for the assignment we only need the output and discussion for the following activities. If you are using non Windows machines the commands may be slightly different. You will have to research to what is an appropriate command for your environment.

IPCONFIG: Finding your computer settings (ifconfig on *nix system may require sudo access)

ARP: Displaying Physical Address

TRACERT: Finding Routes through the Internet

Each of the activities listed include a number of deliverables that you will need to attach as part of your assignment submission. Make sure you provide a description of the activity and the meaning of the result or how the result could be interpreted for full marks. For the output of the commands use the screen capture capabilities. Under Windows use Cmd Alt Print Screen keys combinations to capture the current active window and then paste into word document. For Mac OS use Command-Shift-4, then space, and then click a window you want to capture

Part C: Business Report

Management has identified that in order to provide employees with mobile access a more flexible networking environment needs to be created. Since the organisation uses a typical client server network management has decided that the next logical step would be to move the services to a cloud based solution. The move to the cloud it is argued would remove some of the access restrictions that IT has placed on services and therefore make employees more productive.

Our organisation provides the manufacture and supply of widgets that are in high demand for the production of integrated circuits. Currently we are only a few of the manufacturers that can supply the widgets in the quantity required by our customers. Internal review of our activities has identified that while out manufacturing process is well established the scheduling and processing of orders can lead to delays in processing orders. Changes were proposed to try and alleviate some of the complaints from the employees when accessing and using the organisation IT services in order to schedule the productions. 

The networking is designed as a two tier client server architecture. The backend services provide the data store and retrieval of company information which needs to be guarded carefully. Most of the business processing is performed on the staff desktops. Due to the structure and management of the data, sales people when visiting a client store the orders and quantities onto specially printed note pads which will need to be re-enter into the system once they are back in the office. Recently we have moved to a digitised version of the order form to help the sales people when interacting with customers. Transfer of the data to the organisation systems still needs to be done manually as the information has to be checked against a number of systems before the order can be placed. The re-entry of the data is normally done by office staff but may also be done by the sale people usually during the busy period of the year. Any changes to the original orders and times will require them to contact the client and renegotiate the job order. Employees are require to connect to multiple systems to be able to enter the new orders and place them on the system as production runs. As the processing of the data and information is very important to the organisation the current design requires that when users access a major system they need to re-enter their user credentials.

It was evident from the meeting that management understanding of the cloud services in terms of structures and benefits was not clear enough to make planning decisions. Before proceeding with the proposed plans you have been tasked with providing a report that would be used to re-examine the proposal by researching and providing a report for the following topics.

Note: When we say Mobile devices we mean devices that can be used by employees to access the data and services in an unstructured network environment as well as through other third party networks. 

• The cloud solutions are not well formulated at the moment due to some misunderstanding of what the term actually means. Describe the type of cloud services available, the benefits and disadvantages of each solution.
• It is evident that from the description of the processes in the organisation the processing of information is done by requesting information from number of different sources before the order can be placed in the production queue. Which type of cloud should we be looking at to be able to benefit from remote access to the services while not necessarily modifying our business process and why is that the best solution.
• Nominate the cloud solution that would be best for the organisation in the long run with justifications for your selection. Also include any possible problems that the solution might pose in the future plans.
• Consider the overall impact that the introduction of new devices would have on the network functionality and availability. Identify possible problems and issues that the introduction of mobile computing could have on the network services.
• It is evident that the introduction or restructure can cause a major disruption to the employees with having to adjust to the new technology, new security and access restrictions and so on. Provide advice the management on the need for training and reskilling you think would be needed to maximise the adoption of new technology by the organisational employees.