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Introduction
The company is considering another multinational company equal to its size for acquisition. The decision of the merging of the company with the other multinational brand has been taken by the company’s executive committee and shared with various stakeholders during the executive leadership meet. The CEO (Chief Executive Officer) anticipates a project plan with regards to the Information Technology requirements within the next sixty days. The project plan must strategically integrate all the systems of the company with the multinational company. The merging systems must include databases, infrastructure including all hardware and software components.
This document describes the project plan for the above requirements as laid down by the CEO. The background information, review of current state of infrastructure for supporting the business, enhancements required, and a review of possibilities and opportunities is discussed.
Background Information on the Company
The most successful companies in the new electronic economy are based on internet technology and leverage the technology in all aspects of their business operations (Barua, Whinston, & Yin, 2000, pp. 102) The company has business operations spanning across Internet-based applications, products, and services. The company prides itself for its innovation into the Internet-based technologies and Internet-backed products. The gross revenues of the company reach more than $35 million dollars annually.
Company Business Activities
The business activities of the company range from online auctions, website development, and an E-commerce site for electronic products. The company owns separate website domains for each of the activities. The online auction website generates the largest number of visitors on a daily basis followed by the E-commerce site. The website development and internet-based products generate a constant stream of permanent and new customer base for the company. Much of the customers of the company are a loyal customer base that have continued with the company as a returning and repetitive customers. The company has its office space on one floor.
Current Information System Infrastructure of the Company
The current information system infrastructure of the company comprises of Linux servers, high availability databases, cluster-enabled web application servers, Content Management System (CMS), Security software, antivirus and firewall systems. The current employee strength is twenty-five for which there are forty Dell systems, five internet Wifi routers, and a Dell server for managing the systems over the company’s Ethernet network. Fifteen of the Dell systems have Windows 8.1 installed while ten are equipped with LINUX Ubuntu for the development and maintenance activities of the company’s products and services. There are six machines reserved for web-application servers, website hosting and cluster management for load balancing. Two machines are equipped with 10 TB (TerraBytes) of disk space and used as backup servers while two are used for high-availability database servers holding the Oracle 11g relational database management systems.
Outsourcing and Offshoring Opportunities
Outsourcing is the giving out of contracts to software and hardware vendors or external organizations. Offshoring is getting work done in a different country by setting up the company’s branch or subsidiary. Offshoring requires an IT (Information Technology) or Business Process setup in a different country where skilled software professionals are available in quantity and at a comparably lower cost (Palugod & Palugod, 2011, pp. 13). Outsourcing would require hiring an external organization for doing the work that might be high on cost but would result in time saving and speeding up of the targeted goals. Offshoring would require a setup in a different country which would incur huge costs in the initial setup but remains profitable in the long run as the company expands. Although Offshoring might cost heavy initially, it reaps benefits during the maintenance activities of the company’s business operations (Palugod & Palugod, 2011, pp. 13). However, given the strict timelines and criticality of the job involved it is advisable to outsource some of the critical functions like Data warehousing, hosting, security and hardware maintenance. The software upgrade, development, and maintenance must remain within the company itself. At a later stage offshoring could be considered but at the current stage outsourcing is the best suitable course of action.
Infrastructure Enhancement after Merger
The company’s merger with the multinational company would increase the employee count to sixty-five which, is more than hundred present increase in the employee strength. The company plans to expand from a single floor to a three floors. Such a rapid enhancement would have its impact on the existing infrastructure and require changes at Ethernet, Databases, hosting solutions and security.
Network Infrastructure
The challenge is to increase the capacity of the network according to the growth in company size, number of employees and technological requirements. The demand for the networked components would determine the cost of the upgradation of the network infrastructure. The current number of machines would need to be increased, along with the Wifi routers, internet modems, hubs, switches and appropriate layering of LAN cables. The increase in node machines on the network would also mean that appropriate servers must be installed with an increase in the bandwidth capacity and disk capacity as well. The backup servers for high availability databases needs upgradation along with the internet bandwidth capacity. Appropriate licenses for client software for Windows needs to be obtained. The user authentication and management policies must be revised and upgraded.
Cloud Technology
Cloud Computing is the most recent developments in the field of distributed computing. It provides on-demand access to network components distributed and provided as a shared pool of resources. The cloud components include networks, storage, servers, applications and software services. Cloud allows each of the components to be rapidly provisioned, scale to demand and release accordingly with minimum efforts (Dillon, & Chang, 2010, pp. 27). The service model applicable to the company can be SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). SaaS model could be used for hosting and providing the products of the company over the cloud. PaaS could be used for eliminating the software license and moving the development platform over cloud while IaaS could be beneficial in reducing server costs.
Choosing the Right Cloud Model
There are three types of Cloud deployment models namely Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Private cloud is used within an organization utilizing in-house resources, and it provides maximum security. Public cloud is provided by external vendors and available for use, some of the popular public cloud are Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud (Bluemix), Google App Engine and Force.com. Hybrid cloud is a mixture of private and public cloud, where an in-house hosting could be done utilizing the existing capabilities mixed with public cloud for additional capabilities. Amazon has recently launched Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which is another cloud model providing a more secure hybrid cloud model (Dillon, & Chang, 2010, pp. 28). Given the requirements of the company, the merging with a multinational company and feasibility of using existing capabilities, it is best advised to use the Hybrid cloud model.
Virtualization
Virtualization is the strategy of using independent Virtual Machines (VM) that are isolated from the underlying Operating System and other VMs. Virtualization provides a unique way of running multiple instances of Operating systems on a single machine. It is efficient, cost effective and scalable (Dillon, & Chang, 2010, pp. 28). An independent implementation of Virtualization can be done, or an appropriate cloud deployment model can be obtained using the IaaS cloud service model. Vendors for IaaS are Amazon EC2, IBM Softlayer, and Rackspace.
Security
Security is a major concern when it comes to cloud models especially public cloud deployment. It is a major security concern when it comes to hosting company’s sensitive data and information on a public environment that is vulnerable to hackers. However, the challenge can be met by using an appropriate mix of private and public cloud computing capabilities. On the cloud front as well there have been major developments that are making the cloud environment more secure for the consumers of cloud services. Providers like IBM and Amazon are providing data encryption solutions and highly secured network layers for accessing and using cloud networks (Chen, & Zhao, 2012, pp. 647). Additionally, SSL level and certificate-based encryption and security mechanisms can be applied at the company level for additional security of data and transactions.
Data Warehousing
Data Warehousing is a significant development in the area of Information Systems (IS), and more organizations are moving towards this model from the earlier relational databases and operational systems based models. The most explicit benefit of a Data Warehouse is the improved decision making and enhanced performance of the organization. The decision support provided by data warehouses are plenty, and it performs various levels of cleaning and managing of data. The data mining capabilities are inbuilt and can be used for analytics and information retrieval (Watson, Goodhue & Wixom, 2002, pp. 491).
Summary and Conclusion
The merging of the company with the multinational organization has provided new challenges for the development and maintenance of the infrastructure. Given that the implementations must be carried out in a short span of six months, it is advisable to go for cloud-based solutions both for the network machines, components and the development platforms for hosting and managing applications, products, and services. The implementation of a data warehouse is the most appropriate step in the direction of data mining and big data analytics as enterprise applications are generating large amounts of data. The data warehouse provides an easy mechanism to retrieve information from large sets of data and are appropriate for the growing demands and changing the environment of the company.
Reference
Barua, A., Whinston, A. B., & Yin, F. (2000). Value and productivity in the Internet economy.
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Chen, D., & Zhao, H. (2012, March). Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud
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Dillon, T., Wu, C., & Chang, E. (2010, April). Cloud computing: issues and challenges. In
Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2010 24th IEEE International
Conference on (pp. 27-33). IEEE.
Palugod, N., & Palugod, P. A. (2011). Global trends in offshoring and outsourcing. International
Watson, H. J., Goodhue, D. L., & Wixom, B. H. (2002). The benefits of data warehousing:
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