7 Common IT Management Assignment Questions And Answers
Question
Assessment Resource
Read the questions below and provide written answers (not longer than 300 words for each answer) for each question .
1. identify and describe how methods of analysis and planning approaches, such as cost-benefit analysis, and SWOT analysis, can be applied to technical problems and management requirements
2. You are a network administrator in a company ABC. You have found out that the company is running very old hardware, and is running an unsupported version of Windows (Windows Me) on those computers. What would you advise them about the security implications of running an unsupported version of Windows on their network?
3. You are a network administrator in company ABC. You are monitoring the disk spaced used of the company servers. You find the total capacity available is 10TB, of which 8TB is currently in use. Furthermore, you find that monthly space usage is increasing by 300GB on average. What would you advise them about when they should upgrade their disk capacity and why?
4. You are a network administrator in company ABC. The company has asked you to investigate what operating systems are in use by the organisation, so they can forecast their future licensing costs. What tool(s) could you use to gather information about what operating systems are in use?
5. When using an analysis technique like SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) Analysis, which factors apply (i) to the external environment; and (ii) the internal environment of the company? Why do we need to look at both the external and internal environments when doing strategic planning?
6. When attempting to identify technology and product directions for evaluating and forecasting vendor and technology trends in IT, what are two factors that can influence the direction of technological evolution?
7. You are a network administrator for Great Games (GG), a games company that runs its game servers in the Google Cloud Platform. Currently GG runs a pool of 6 N1-Standard machines running Windows 2012 in GCP, each of which is priced at $70 per month. GG budget is for each 50 users per server, and as each user pays $5 per month to play, this gives GG a healthy margin on their infrastructure costs i.e. 50 x 5 = $250 of income per server, giving GG a margin of $180 per server per month. (Assume there are 300 users in total)
Answer
Answer 1
This IT management Assignment addressed SWOT analysis and strategies applied in business management and technical problems to make strategic decisions, mission redefining, and helps to develop the goals. This analysis helps to prioritizing the objectives of development. There are four methods present in the SWOT analysis and those are finding strong points, weak points, threatened factors and future and present opportunities. Using the method of finding weak points and finding threatened factors managers of the company can easily find out the technical problems and ask for its solution to the technical head of the company. And next using finding opportunity method, requirements of the management can be found and that helps to prioritizing the objectives of development. In case of cost benefit Analysis some analytical frameworks are used just to assess the cost of policy proposal and benefits and focus on the efficiency of economy and calculate net benefits of each policy proposal and incorporate all relevant benefits and costs at the same time have a vision for long term goals. These methods are helpful in technical problem and management requirement. Because these methods evaluate projects, prepare sales projection and budgets, prioritize the investments and establish business goals (Lynch et al. 2018).
Answer 2
The implication of using unsupported operating system can be dangerous in many aspects such as the system updates can be a risk for the computer that means no security patches are present. Authorization of 3rd party does will not support the operating system, functionality will be lost, hippa compilation problem will occur, Data risk of customer is a vital issue that would hamper the company image. So there will be some suggestion to mitigate this issue and those are employee should keep track of applications and all legacy systems, those system needs to isolate from the primary networks using strict rules of accessing, and they needs to monitor the use. First it is unethical to use an unsupported system so company needs to change the system as per its convenience. It may cost a huge amount but most important is the information security. Somehow the system get hacked or crash for updating any software then company might loss all its data which is undesirable. Proper use of technical tools and improvement in technical specifications that is required for making business profitable needs to be evaluated and then it needs to be implemented. Improved technology makes proper use of data and the security of that data is important and if windows unsupported version is used then proper use of data cannot be made. Implications of proper strategies for understanding of proper technical specifications are essential for profits of business and also technical specifications are essential for implementation of strategies and also profitability of business.
Answer 3
Total disk space is 10TB
Total usage till date is 8TB
Total free space is (10-8) = 2 TB
Now each month usage is 300 GB
This 2 TB will be last for, number of month is = {(1024*2)/300} = 6.82 month.
Last 2 TB of the free disk space can be used for upcoming 6.82 month. After that company needs to follow the given suggestions to get the access of usable disk space.
Technical specifications are important for a business to understand and that is important for use of technology for business. It is quite obvious that low disk space is a biggest problem for a business organization and extension of disk space is the ultimate solution for the mitigating this major issue. But this solution can be cost effective so for temporary mitigation the issue, 3 ways are present which can help to solve. First Disk clean up option can be used but for an organization it is tough to clean up the information and it is time consuming to clean the data according to priority and finding out the less important data from the huge data (Galleries & Leidner, 2014). So running the built-in tool named disk clean-up should run to remove the temporary data and other unimportant data. Next extending partition on the disk only if on the rest of the disk has enough free space. And the last solution could be extending the partition with other hard disk or external hard drives. If these 3 solutions did not work then company needs to arrange or buy new hard disk which will be connected externally.
Answer 4
Detecting operating system is not easy to find out. There are few tools present in recent days which help to find out the operating system in few steps. These kinds of tools can find out the operating system from a remote system. Tools used for operating system fingerprinting such as NMap, XProbe2, p0f.
N’Map: A remote OS detection can be done using TCP/IP stack fingerprinting. A series of UDP and TCP packets are send by N’map to the hosting system and that will examines every bits and its will perform some tests like TCP ISN sampling, ID sampling, TCP ordering and support and check the initial size of the window then N’map will compares the result with 2600 unknown fingerprints of OS and prints the details of the operating system. If N’map is unable to find out the OS then N’map will provide URL to that can be used to submit the finger print.
XProbe2: this is an active fingerprinting tool use different approach to OS finger printing. Xprobe2 works on probabilistic guess, fuzzy signature matching, signature database and multiple matches simultaneously. This tool use several modules to check the response of the target after send the request and scans for open ports to make more accurate detection.
Answer 5
SWOT analysis is used to find out internal environment of the organization as well as external environment because the analysis is done to find out the strength and weakness of organization that defines the internal environment of the organization (Luftman, Lyytinen & ben, 2017). The strength of the organization describes the strong points of the organization and weakness describes the weak points of the organization and these points depend on the internal factors influence by the organizations. On the other hand opportunities and threat defines the external environment of the organization. Because the points come under these two analyses are depend on the external factors where organization has no influence on that. The importance of analyzing the external and internal environment while planning for organizational strategy is describes in the following sections. This analysis helps to determine and evaluate the competitive edge of the organization and how it is influencing by the internal or external factors, net this helps to analyze the SMEs which describes if the SMEs are capable enough or not to sustain the completive advantage of the organization over the time, next it draw the correlation between external environment and competitive advantage and same correlation with internal environment, next it review the pertaining of literature the tangible assets, intangible assets, competitive advantage, SMEs etc.
Answer 6
In case of new technology evaluation few factors are directly influence to make that evaluation strong. And there are 5 factors present which drive the force to get birth of a technological firm and those are
1. Leadership support
2. Stakeholder involvement
3. Tanning
4. Resource and financial support
5. Support from campus community
In this segment only two factors will be discussed those are Leadership support and Stakeholder involvement.
Leadership support: Technical innovations need support from administrator and executive level and it helps to make a foster campus culture with encouragement of innovation. These allow a level of risk at the same time strengthens the potential to achieve success. Having a support from higher level gives freedom to the IT leaders to take risk while they are pursuing the cutting edge technology and gives latitude to experiment.
Stakeholder involvement: Involving stakeholder in the field of IT industry helps to make a communication with the IT leaders and in this way they can communicate with the innovatives ideas.
Answer 7
(i) There are several monitoring tools are present in the market which serve window servers and few free monitoring tools also present that could be used in this monitoring mission and those are MONITOR.US, SERVER & APPLICATION MONITOR.
SERVER & APPLICATION MONITOR tools serves more than basic server monitoring. This delivers monitoring like out-of-the-box for hardware of multi-vendor server and serve deep application monitoring more than 200 applications. This monitoring tool provides capacity planning, assets inventory, user permission, advanced alters, reports.
(ii)If Great Games have total 300 users then total number of server needs to identify by the given information that states 50 users use 1 server.
So total number of server is 300/50= 6
Now the utilization is 85%
If the utilization step down to 70% then extra server needs to be implemented
If the utilization step down to 70% then extra server needs to be implemented
Now total number of server will be 10
So number of user for each of the server is = (300/10) =30
Each user pays $5
Now the margin of infrastructure cost of each server is = (30* $5) = 150
Now the profit margin per server per month will be (150-70) = $80
So cost efficiency will be $100 less than before.
References
Galleries, R. D., & Leidner, D. E. (Eds.). (2014). Strategic information management: challenges and strategies in managing information systems. Routledge.
Luftman, J., Lyytinen, K., & ben Zvi, T. (2017). Enhancing the measurement of information technology (IT) business alignment and its influence on company performance. Journal of Information Technology, 32(1), 26-46.
Lynch, B. M., Nguyen, N. H., Reeves, M. M., Moore, M. M., Rosenberg, D. E., Wheeler, M. J., ... & English, D. R. (2018). Study design and methods for the ACTIVity And TEchnology (ACTIVATE) trial. Contemporary clinical trials, 64, 112-117.
