Database and Data Warehousing Design
Project Deliverable 1: Project Plan Inception
Kheezer Ali
CIS 499 Information Systems Capstone
07-14-2019
Summer 2019
Dr. Reddy Urimindi
I have spent the past ten years in the information technology industry working for a few different companies in different industries. With this information and my soon to be completed degree in computer information systems. I have been able to garner experience in almost every aspect of IT ranging from customer support roles now to my newly appointed position as CIO of XYZ Corporation. I began my time here as a member of a small but very quickly growing company. Founded in 2017, XYZ has set itself apart from the rest of the companies in the marketing field by offering highly personal and white-gloved consultation to our clients. We see ourselves as a customer service firm that specializes in offering our clients new and innovative ideas on how to attract more clients. We use data analytics and collection to help companies understand what parts of their websites are garnering the most traffic to allow them to adjust their marketing strategies to help capture more business and keep repeat customers. Our team is really good at what we do. This has translated into a growing portfolio of clients around the country. As a business grows our company has to grow with it. The first thing that we need to do is ensure that our systems are able to scale along with the number of clients that we find ourselves supporting and providing important services to. In a recent meeting with my CEO Bob, I was promoted to Chief Information Officer. I was also immediately informed that I will be in charge of the largest expansion of office space and system size that I have ever been a part of. This responsibility is both exciting and very important to the future of our company.
Given our current size of twenty full-time employees that mostly work on site and provide consultation online or over the phone. Traveling to client site rarely for our largest client whose office is about a few miles away. Telework is not a huge part of our workforce but we will be expanding our VPN capabilities soon due to our expansion as our employees may spend a good amount of time working from home due to construction and renovation of the new office space. Of our twenty employees, our IT and IS team currently consists of four people myself included. We have a networking and security guru who manages our corporate network. A cloud engineer that we recently hired to help with our future cloud-based initiatives. We have a system admin for all Windows-based resources and myself, an IT generalist fluent in everything our company uses in IT. Currently, we are hosting all resources using on-site servers. We do not engage in much offshoring or outsourcing due to the size of our operation. This may very well change as the company begins to grow. I have been researching highly recommended vendors in the event we implement a global help desk or require consulting for any future migrations or implementation projects. We are scaling in size, a reliable and forward thinking system should have scalability in the forefront of its design. With that in mind, I believe that a cloud-hosted solution will be best suited for our resources and systems. I started to evaluate the cloud providers in the industry and after consulting with my colleagues and doing my own research. I believe that the AWS cloud is what will drive our IT operations moving forward. I am a believer in security and we will leverage our knowledge to ensure the safety of our network and the intellectual property we are helping our clients develop.
We will be hosting our resources using Windows EC2 instances we will use both Windows and Windows server instances to host our Exchange and our Active Directory directly on the Cloud. This will allow our systems admin to continue to monitor and manage our user base without having to completely change our way of managing users and accounts. Block Storage will allow us to upload our data to these new instances and keep up to date snapshots in the event of any outages. I have been in contact with our We will begin the migration efforts within in 30 days of our project proposal being approved by the CEO. We will have our network engineer ensure that network security is at the forefront of all of our resources and ensure that intrusion stays to a minimum. We will also utilize RDS MySQL DB instances for our data collection and database storage. The team and I are evaluating the use of Amazon Redshift for any big data needs we encounter in the future as our company and client base continue to grow. Since our workforce is growing alongside our client base. I have planned to implement a telework initiative for our employees. We will be adopting the use of a Cisco VPN client for remote access to our Network. We will also be creating Amazon WorkSpace users for all employees with the ability to work remotely. We will utilize Gemalto Tokens for all telework eligible employees that will be necessary for accessing the network outside of headquarters. The Amazon WorkSpace client will be downloaded directly to each user’s laptop and integrated with our Active Directory. This will also double as our disaster response avenue in the event that employees are not able to access the office. Each employee will have the full functionality outside of the office as they would sitting at their desk. In my research of the new implementation, I have identified a strategic partner that we will leverage for implementation of incident response team which will be headed up by our network engineer and will grow in size as the company does.
Since we are increasing the size of our office space I am working with our networking engineer to plan out the hard wired network connection and physical network security resources we will need to procure to ensure all cables are secure. We will implement multiple WiFi networks to allow any guests access to the internet as needed without granting access to the employee network. This new plan will be submitted to the CEO for an initial review within the next two weeks. I believe that since we are a company that has branded ourselves as forwarding think and cutting edge that we should implement a solution that embodies that state of mind. With the knowledge we have available and the leveraging of new partnerships. I believe that we have a sound plan in place that will both allow us to implement a new system that drives productivity and allows us the ability to scale. As our client list grows our employee base will grow with it. The hard work of our team in the coming months will allow us to grow our system in an efficient and cost-effective manner for the future.
References
Getting Started on Amazon Web Services (AWS). (n.d.). Retrieved July 14, 2019, from https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/