project week 6

You will find below my comments.

· Please, follow APA guidelines to format images and tables. You must also refer in your document, the images, and tables that you list on your paper. Citation should be above picture

· Please, review the Solution section - Technology Solution sub-section: you included technologies that you don't mention in your implementation section, including Azure cloud-based service, Recoverit, Cisco Integrated Service Virtual Router (ISR), WD My Book Duo 4TB, and Secugen Biometric scanner.

· Please, review and update the budget information for the instance (virtual machine) that you will use in your project.

· Please, review and update the Installation - System Management section.

·

Abstract

ABC is a packaging solution company that had bought other small packaging companies, those small companies were found to be using their ticketing system and because of that ABC felt that the workflow was not being done efficiently and effectively as possible. This made ABC start the process of finding a way in which they would come up with a single operating system that the other companies will use. This meant that when that system would be developed they were supposed to abandon the systems they already had. A ticketing system was to be developed whose work would have been to the request customers made by supporting them in any way necessary through the help of their customer care service representatives. This would assist the companies workflow and improve its performance; since the company expanded to one thousand employees, it needed to maintain its competitive edge in the packaging industry by ensuring the customers were fully satisfied with their services.

The system that was to be built would operate on the Windows Server environment since it had a redundancy mechanism that would ensure server uptime and high availability is maintained at any given point of time. This was a way of making sure that the system does not experience any downtime and by doing so it would have inconvenienced the business stakeholders which would have ruined the company's reputation. Three ticketing systems had been proposed by the company so that they would be compared and to find which among the ticketing system would suit the need of the company, they included Hubspot, ServiceNow, and ConnectWise. All these systems were put under consideration to determine which one of them would suit the business needs of ABC solution and at the same time run under Windows Server environment.

Introduction

A Ticketing system is normally used by companies to help them in managing the kind of services they provide as well any other support cases, the work of the system is documenting the requests of customers and their interaction at a given period of time and by doing it would be easier for representatives working in the customer service department to resolve any complicated issue (Aashirwad Kumar,& Ravikumar, 2020). By the aid of a ticketing system assignments can be prioritized in a better way by the customer service team, this will in the end give them the room of creating a customer experience that is more enjoyable. This type of system usually helps the organization to overcome any kind of roadblock they might face during their working process and in turn, provides a solution which scalable enough to support the customer care service representative.

Typically, An organization that uses a ticketing system can catalog and organize a high volume of support cases found in the customer care department. A representative of the customer care department can manage multiple instances since every ticket is usually labeled, and in most cases, they are prioritized depending on the level of urgency (Shafique et al., 2019). Customer care and the customers can communicate more easily since the customers can access a ticket quickly through their email inbox, which will allow them to send the questions they want to ask directly to the representative who is handling their respective cases. In this paper, we are going how ABC which is a packaging solution tried to create a single ticketing system used by the company after it had bought a bunch of other companies that come with their ticketing system. ABC will be more concerned about a single ticketing system that the company will use to accommodate all its business needs and processes.

Problem Description

Problem Definition

Problem

The problem with ABC packaging solutions is the company bought out a couple of other smaller companies that each use their ticketing system software. The goal is to establish a new single software for the company to use as a whole. This approach will help ABC as a company manage, track, and capture the current status of the issues experienced by customers in the organization in a highly collaborative and organized manner. The use of a single system will allow the organization to improve work efficiency since the information gathered during the use of a single system can be used in providing proper visibility of the service events of the past and how the system aided in resolving the issues raised (Ellison et al., 2017).

The small organizations that ABC had bought, were using a ticketing system that could not support a huge workload of information, since they were only designed to work in a small working environment. This meant that in a case where there was a lot of traffic due to high customer service demand, the system they were using would not sustain it. For this reason they needed a single system that could manage a huge workload and store information in a central position.

Organization

The company we will be implementing this for is a fictional company named ABC packaging solutions. ABC packaging is a pre-established company that essentially will be expanding to 1000 employees. Its packaging design involves processes like color, function, sustainability, and forms. These things are very vital for any company which is in the packaging business i.e., ABC. This is because the package of a product usually determines the first impression the customer has about the product, and if it is properly designed, then it will attract the eyes of the customer.

ABC is more concerned about the user experience in its packaging solution process. The creation of innovative structures and authentic sensory interactions has made the product packaging solution a delight to the industry. The company structure is that of a functional one where every person is categorized depending on the kind of function he is performing in the business. The operations are also incorporating different techniques to improve the design and attractiveness of a packaged product. The operations management has been efficient as possible, given the personnel in charge an easy time to manage.

Outcomes

The desired outcome will be a single ticketing system that any user can access with a helpdesk request. The system will have a simple user interface and will auto-assign the request to the appropriate department within IT. Tickets will be able to have a level of urgency assigned.

Here a ticket system will enable the support system of the IT department to be focused, organized, effective, and efficient. It will aid in helping and supporting any incident or issues that the organization might experience, from the time they are captured until they are resolved, and the outcome desired during that process will be to ensure that customers are fully satisfied at any given point in time. Since we desire a single system that can be used by the entire organization, our system solution will be required to maintain a high form of availability. This is because when there is a server downtime, the ticketing solution process will not be completed, and this can make our business lose a lot of good reputation.

This means that when we are designing that ticketing system, our major engineering fundamental is to provide redundancy. This will make sure that in case the system experience any failure, there is a mechanism or a component that will be able to take over from the failed system. We will use Windows Server since it has great redundancy mechanisms, that are either out-of-the box or built-in. Therefore, they will help provide redundancy for the ticketing system solution that we are going to develop, which will be used to house the workload production.

Windows Server redundancy will assist in ensuring there is high system availability as well as server uptime. The following are some of the redundancy mechanism that we are going to get from Windows Server 2019 that we will use during the development process. Guest clustering, Failover clustering, Network Load Balancing, and Storage Spaces Direct, these mechanisms will enable the Windows Server to have the ability to increase its readability in the Windows underlying infrastructure, system, the applications present (Lee, 2019).

Technology Solution

Because information technology departments have a high volume of requests, ABC packaging solutions must implement a centralized system that can handle these incidents. The proposed solution includes the research of at least three ticketing software services that the company would potentially use. The tickets will contain IT related issues submitted from every department and then distributed to the appropriate section to resolve these issues. Each ticketing system will be installed on a virtual machine with a demonstration of how it works. The goal is to have several solutions that can be considered for their pros and cons. The ticketing system will need the following for the company to consider streamlining it as their main Software:

Can it be easily accessed and understood by end client users?

Can the tickets be separated into different sections within the department? For example, helpdesk, Networking, Information assurance, Applications.

Is it cost-effective? Does it need a subscription or will it be a one time purchase?

Can you apply different levels of urgency depending on the user it is affecting?

Is the system secure? This will be a top priority as tickets could contain sensitive information.

Can it be accessed 24/7? IT is a full-time operation the needs to be handled at all hours of the day. The system needs to be fully functional through all of this .

Hubspot was the first ticketing system that we selected as a company. Its Help desk tool will allow us to track, log, and organize the customers' support in one dashboard that the entire customer service team will access. The Help Desk feature will allow Hubspot to create a ticket automatically when the customer fills the form, then an email is sent, or even they can be reached out through a live chat (Weking et al 2018). This kind of ticket system will provide analytics that the manager in charge of the customer care representatives can use in evaluating the performance of his team.

ServiceNow is another ticketing system that can be used. It is a ticket system that simply goes beyond the simple logging in since all IT platforms are bought in one place by this system because one of its primary focus is efficiency. It will enable us to be able to consolidate all our system networks as well as Software in a centralized dashboard. A person can track the custom metrics and at the same time be in a position of creating his internal user workflows.

The last proposed ticketing solution we chose was ConnectWise. It is a software ticketing solution that provided a platform for business process automation that was full-blown. It is a software that was mainly designed for companies that needed to support their workflow automation under the same digital Platform. Apart from just being a ticketing system, it also had the following capability: time tracking, project management, procurement, billing, and reporting. If we also needed to add any other functionality, the system was designed so that we could customize it by integrating other third-party software services in all these systems mentioned above will be required to run in the Windows Server network environment.

Description of Hands-On Component

Using Microsoft teams, we will share my screen showing a virtual computer. If necessary, we will demonstrate the install of a virtual machine setup. After setup, we will demonstrate how to download each Software that will be the ticketing systems. Once downloaded, I will run each system from the admin end and the users end. The admin perspective demonstration will include login, how to assign tickets, how to close them, how to create new groups, etc. From the user end, we will demonstrate how to login which should be browser-based. We will also show how to submit tickets and check the status.

To demonstrate these procedures clearly, we will use other teaching aids such as pictures and models if necessary that will ensure these points are brought out clearly. Though challenges might arise, we will perform an early preparation so as to ensure nothing goes wrong during the presentation. From both the admin perspective and user end, it is important for both parties to understand how to navigate through the Software in a first-timer point of view, therefore, we will demonstrate the prominent and most basic features of the programs that either of them would be quick to learn and use (Schwichow et al., 2016).

Solution

Need s Assessment

The system has numerous needs and wants but only fundamental ones have been stated here. Needs are fundamental, and our network cannot survive without them, whereas the system is able to survive without wants. Our first need is Network infrastructure; these are the Software and hardware components required for the system to function. Secondly, a database is required to store all the data generated in the system (Raeisi & Giorgetti, 2016). Next, a backup and recovery system is required to prevent losses due to data loss. Our third want is access control, as it is important to regulate who can access the data since it will not be safe if just anyone can access it. Finally, data integrity should be maintained so that whichever information is stored in the system makes sense and is as accurate

Network infrastructure

It is normally a software and hardware resource of a network in entirety which allows communication, network connectivity, operation and enterprise management network. Therefore it is a need because it provides a path of communication as well as services between the processes, users, and the network application services present. Without it the element of connectivity and communication might not be possible; hence it's a very important aspect of the system operating environment. A good network infrastructure allows operations taking place within the system to run smoothly, it should also be a secure network infrastructure free from attacks or breaches of data found within the system.

Other than the network infrastructure's security, it should also be agile (Almoghathawi & Baker, 2019). This ensures there are no complexities, operations are simplified and automation is embraced. The scalability of the network should also be put into consideration. To go in line with its expansion programs, ABC will have to ensure the network's scaling capability will be able to support it in the future. High resilience and fault-tolerance of the network would be guaranteed because the distributed systems will function best with a reliable interconnection. Finally, a flawless integration of the network components shall be ensured. The storage, networking, compute and the other surrounding systems should have a frictionless high coordination.

Database

This is another requirement that the system needs to function. It is where all the data collected are stored, and the database is designed so that it's easy to access and store information. It is crucial for a system to have a database since it stores all the details that are pertinent such as transaction records, employee records and many more. When the system uses database management, it will allow effective integration of data present within the organization. It will be easy for a person to see how one segment in the system affects the other component. Users of the system can also make quick and informed decision as a result of the database, without a database a system cannot function as expected therefore it's very important for the system.

A database is therefore very vital for the company, employing the best database in the market is therefore very important and hence we need to know what properties we are looking for before settling for a database. Although there are many desired for a good database, for this case a database which can efficiently and satisfactorily perform these functions will be considered; a scalable, easy retrievable, secure, multiple views, data persistence, high data integrity and easy to modify too (Poddar et al., 2016). Having satisfied these conditions, benefits such as data integrity, backup and recovery, sharing of data and privacy will be enjoyed.

Backup and recovery

A system needs to have a backup and recovery because it will be able to restore the lost data without losing any information during that process in the event of a system failure. When present in the system, it creates copies of data. If there is any corruption or loss of data, they can be restored. Since data loss in a system can occur anytime, the system should not run at a loss of losing all information because it failed to incorporate backup and recovery in its requirements. Therefore it is essential for a system to have backup as a need not as a want, because if that is not done the effectiveness and the efficiency of the system will be very much unreliable.

Losses due to data loss have been constantly on the rise, backing up data regularly is an insurance policy. No matter how small it is or fewer files it affects, a security breach can turn to be a very heavy loss on the company. Nowadays, systems are highly vulnerable to ransomware; hackers can easily lock out the organization out of its own system and demand a ransom in cryptocurrency. In such a case, with constant backing up of data might save the organization from paying hackers a lot of money. Natural disasters can also put the company out of business. It is also given special attention too. To be safe the system can be backed up by one or more of the many data backup options in the market. These may include physical backup in hard drives and other memory devices on the business premises or out of the business premises, or the company can opt for cloud backup for its systems (Chuang & Wang, 2017).

Access control

It is important for a system to have an access control mechanism as a way of security technique where there is regulation on what a person can view and what he cannot view, and who are the people allowed to access particular part of the system and who are not. Its concept fundamental for information security and physical security which is developed mainly minimize the amount of risk. Access control also helps in guaranteeing users who they are when using the system and what level of data are they allowed to access, it restricts access to data. Authentication and authorization are some of the techniques that help in access control, where authentication simply tries to find out if the person accessing the system is truly who he says he is. While authorization is where someone has the permission to access the system resource.

The three broad types of access control are; role-based access control, mandatory access control, and discretionary access control.This therefore means access will be limited according to the role of an employee in the organization when role-based access is used, or, a software or a hardware component can be used to restrict access when mandatory access control method is used. Or one can have a discreet control over all data available. No matter which method is employed, the five stages of access control procedures must be guaranteed. In the first stage, authorization is first confirmed whether the one is a stranger or a member of the organization. Secondly, authentication takes place chromomeres are allowed to continue whereas strangers are locked out. Next, one is allowed to access the information after access is granted. From this point the user can manage the database by scaling the information, monitoring the information and troubleshooting for problems in the system. Finally, the access control must be audited for compliance reports, suspicious events and scale (Zhang et al., 2018).

Data integrity

A system needs to be a data integrity system where there is assurance and maintenance of data by making sure it is consistent and accurate throughout the data life-cycle. Secure integrity of data will enable the kind of information stored in the database to remain accurate, complete, and reliable no matter how often it's accessed or even how long it's stored. It is therefore very important to ensure that a person is developing a system he or she needs to ensure that data integrity is uphold during that process of data lifecycle is complete.

The two major types of integrity i.e. physical integrity and logical integrity must be met. Physical integrity may be compromised with things such as electromechanical faults, natural disasters, corrosion and material fatigue, these affect fetching and storing of the data. However, logical integrity deals with the accuracy and correctness of the data itself. It ensures entity integrity and referential integrity of information. These ensures the data makes sense and is free from altering. It is ensured by methods such as foreign key constraints, check constraints and program assertions. A well-defined and controlled data integrity will ensure stability, maintainability, re-usability, and performance (Liu et al., 2017).

Technology Solution and Requirements

The technological solutions and requirements can be looked into closely and more specifically. The hardware and Software used in our system have specifications and the minimum requirement to work properly (Satoto, 2016).

You may want to use bullets to organize the requirements. Please, note that you are listing Windows Server 2012 and its requirements, but you use Windows Server 2019 in your implementation. Also, you should list the server requirements that your solution will need.

· Windows Azure system

· windows operating system

· 8 GB RAM

· 40GB disk space

· MySQL

· Windows os

· 4GB RAM

· 10GB or higher disk space

· ticketing software

· 8 cores 2.5GHZ+ minimum,

· 16GB RAM

· 100GB

· Lost data recovery software specifications

· Windows OS

· Windows Server 2019

· 1GHZ or higher processor

· 2 GB RAM

· 100MB minimum disk space

· administrative rights

· vRouter specifications

· CPU

· memory

PC hardware such as Peripheral Component Interconnect Bus, Interrupt Request Controller, Management Ethernet Interface, serial console, and auxiliary ports. These are but the few technical specifications required to run some of our system's hardware and Software.

Azure cloud-based service

This requirement will enable us to be accessed in the internet by our users since we will on the cloud. Azure's system requirements depend on the type of deployment used of the two available deployment options, i.e., express deployment and distributed deployment. For express deployment, only one physical virtue machine is required. Any 8 GB RAM may be used except dynamic memory; a disk space of 40 GB is also required. For distributed deployment, installation is possible on several physical and virtual machines. It works with a minimum of 8 physical machines with 2 CPUs minimum. An 8GB non-dynamic RAM is also required, and a disk space of 40 GB is also enough (Azure, 2016).

However, Azure has other software pre-requisites. These include Windows Server® 2012 and Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Additional components required to run Azure include Windows Server 2012 R2, which entails Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack (SP) 1, IIS 8.5(built in component of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Web Platform Installer 5. (optional). Windows Server 2016 is also required before installing Azure; it entails Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack (SP) 1, Internet Information Services (IIS) 10 (a built-in component of Windows Server 2016), .NET Framework 4.25 Extended with ASP.NET, Microsoft Web Platform Installer 5.2 (optional).

Azure as a cloud computing solution offers the three main categories, i.e., Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). For our ticketing solution, we will only require services of IaaS; this is because, for this service, the cloud provider (Azure) provides physical resources like network, servers, and storage, whereas other infrastructures such as web servers and databases, are managed and maintained by the user.

MySQL Database management system

It will be used to store all data for easy retrieval and access by employees and users. MySQL is available for the Windows platform. It supports Windows 7 (64-bit Professional level or higher). Hardware requirements for running MySQL smoothly are a minimum of 4 GB RAM (6GB recommended), Intel Core or Xeon 3GHZ (or Dual Core 2GHZ) or equal AMD CPU, the minimum display resolution of 1024x768 but 1280x1024 resolution is recommended, Nvidia or ATI with support of OpenGL 1.5 or higher graphic accelerators is required. Software requirements include, Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework, Cairo 1.6 or later, glib-2.10, libxml-2.6, libsigc++2.0, pcre and libzip (Satoto et al., 2016).

With MySQL installed, buyers and management can get quick access to the database and therefore get privileges such as Data manipulation (changing, adding, deleting, and more), Data query (requesting specified information from the database), Data access control (providing security methods for data protection) and data identity (defining the identity of the data).

ServiceNow

This will be the ticketing software that we are going to implement in our project as the single ticketing system used by the company. We are opting for ServiceNow as our ticketing software because of its better integration tools, which help it link with other company departments. Another advantage of its high ROI, consolidated processes, which eliminate redundancy and increases efficiency. It also improves productivity as it does away with time-wasting as one waits for approvals and responses. It is automated to notify the responsible personnel of an awaiting approval or response.

Before installing ServiceNow, the following minimum requirements must be met to run smoothly, 8 cores 2.5GHZ+ minimum (16 cores recommended), 16GB RAM, and 100GB disk pace (Kotha, 2017). Windows OS, it also requires MySQL database to run. Server minimum requirements include 8 cores 2GH, 16 GB RAM, and 40GB free disk space. Minimum client requirements include 4 cores 2GHZ, 4 GB RAM, and free disk space of 1GB. Web server minimum requirements are 4 cores 1.65 GHz, 4 GB RAM, and 40 GB free disk space.

Recoverit

Cisco Integrated Service Virtual Router (ISR)

ISR is where the items are saved from the transactions done within the system, such as files or any other items that will be stored. Cisco integrated service as a vRouter will serve a huge purpose for the ticketing solution. Elastic scaling of resources will be made possible with Cisco vRouter, hardware costs will also be lowered, and the flexibility of moving around the data center will also be enhanced (Taylor, 2018). Cisco vRouter will require the following resources to function properly, CPU, and memory. PC hardware such as Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus, Interrupt Request Controller(IRQ), Management Ethernet Interface, serial console and auxiliary ports, network interfaces, and CD-ROM drive. Cisco vRouter supports hard disk (FAT32 formatted), disk0 (QNX formatted), disk1 (an optional user-specified format), boot flash (FAT32 formatted), and NVRAM (FAT32formated). Integrating Cisco vRouter into the system will ensure transactions done in the system are recorded.

WD My Book Duo 4TB

It is where the items that are saved form the transactions done within the system such as files or any other items will be stored. As the business continues daily, data will be generated from the tickets issued, sales made, among other transactions. It is, therefore, important to have somewhere to store this information. WD My Book Duo 4TB is a hard drive from WD My Book with a storage capacity of 4TB. The hard drive has AES hardware 256-bit encryption, which will ensure the security of the files within. With this installed, the system will now be ready to function. However, WD My Book will be the primary storage device, but as earlier stated, backup is important; therefore, another independent storage device will be required to backup data. Other than encryption, the data integrity within this drive must be protected because it is at this point that un-wanted access may cause havoc. Therefore strict adherence to data integrity maintenance must be upheld to protect the system from losses and hence to avoid losses

SecuGen biometric scanner

It will be used to ensure the level of security of accessing devices is uphold, and only those who have been given the permission to access certain part of the system will be the only ones who do so. As a security measure, access to the database and servers shall be highly restricted, and only authorized personnel shall be allowed to access it. Secugen biometric scanners are highly reputable fingerprint scanners, which are FBI-certified (Abu-Elreesh, & Abu-Naser, 2019). As stated earlier, access control is vital as it determines information an employee or a customer can access depending on rank. Secugen biometric scanners can also prove useful in determining who is a member of the organization and who is not. Once access control is in place, data integrity will surely come easily as it will be difficult for foreigners to access the system.

Design

In designing the network topology of the system, it is important to determine which topology is going to be used in the network. First, we need to understand that topology is the arrangement of nodes (routers and switches) and how they are connected in a network. They are normally represented on a graph. There are six major network topologies, they are, bus topology, ring topology, star topology, mesh topology and hybrid topology. In the bus topology, there is a single cable that runs from one end to another of the network and all devices are connected to it the coaxial /RJ45 cable is normally used in this topology (Kim & Lee, 2018).

The ring topology on the other hand connects all devices in the system in a circular form. The network ensures that every device has two neighbors. In the star topology, however, all the devices in the network are connected directly to the switch and indirectly to each other. The hub acts as a server and the devices act as clients. The devices can only communicate with each other through the server. With this topology, wire connections are done by coaxial cables, twisted pair and fiber cable. Mesh topology on the other hand has all devices in the network interconnected. Data is transmitted in two methods, flooding and routing. When two or more topologies come together to form one large topology, they form a hybrid topology. The topology chosen for our network must have minimum cable length requirements, affordable and scalable.

Design - Purpose and Scope

The network topology that I have chosen is a star topology. It is a type of topology where a central hub connects every host in that network topology. It helps in reducing the amount of impact failure in the transmission line by connecting each of the host to the central hub independently. The function of the hub is to work as a server whose responsibility is to manage and control the entire network function, if a specific host is in need for sending any kind of message to another host; it will first have to send that particular message to central hub which is connecting all those devices, then the central hub will replicate the message sent to it and then forwards it to the most appropriate host. Every workstation in the star topology usually has a cable goes from the network interface card all the way to the network switch.

The reason for choosing this type of topology is that it is a highly flexible, reliable type of topology and sends and receives data at high speed. It is a type of network topology which is very easy to maintain and manage since every node usually need to have separate cables; detecting failure is also an easy thing to do in this topology because in case a failure occurs it will only affect one single user. Extension of the network can be done without having the entire network disturbed, this topology will help me in meeting my project needs since the aim of the project would be to develop a single system for usage. The other companies which were bought would have an easy time of sharing information with each other at flexible, reliable and high speed, therefore resources will be saved since all the information will be managed and controlled with ease. It will also reduce the probability of a network failure since all the systems are connected to the central hub.

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Technology Budget

Building a technology budget is one of the toughest things in putting up the system. The latest technology today may be rendered obsolete in the next two years; therefore, it is important to perform our investigations and spend wisely. Building a technology budget takes into account various aspects. First, as the budget is being drafted, advancement in technology or damage or any other case may force the organization to replace or update its machineries (Thamhain, 2014). A replacement schedule is therefore an important consideration and may be discussed widely in a board meeting. Budgeting must also take into consideration how purchase of these machineries will be funded. Balancing expenditure and income are very important since we do not want to spend what we don't have. Once the required items are identified, a cost analysis is done and a complete mapped and documented budget is drawn (Taylor, 2003).

Our cloud servers will go by the following budget

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