You are a Network Engineer with a computer systems integration company named ABC I.T. You have been tasked with designing a new network implementation for ABC IT Institute that has recently leased a building in Melbourne CBD with the aim of offering IT related courses to its currently enrolled 400 students. The building will house some offices, classrooms, library, and computer labs. The Four-story building has six computer labs and each of these labs will have 25 computers having internet connectivity. Each lab will also have a server in the closet located inside the lab. IP phones are located in each lab to communicate to service desk. The IT Institute also wants to setup six classrooms, each containing one computer which requires internet connectivity, one whiteboard, one display monitor and an IP phone.

 

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1)

Relevant Costs for Equipment Replacement Decision
Health Scan, Inc. paid $50,000 for X-ray equipment four years ago. The equipment was expected to have a useful life of 10 years from the date of acquisition with annual operating costs of $50,000. Technological advances have made the machine purchased four years ago obsolete with a zero salvage value. An improved X-ray device incorporating the new technology is available at an initial cost of $146,000 and annual operating costs of $23,000. The new machine is expected to last only six years before it, too, is obsolete. Asked to analyze the financial aspects of replacing the obsolete but still functional machine, Health Scan’s accountant prepared the following analysis. After looking over these numbers, the Center’s manager rejected the proposal.

Six-year savings [($50,000 ? $23,000) Af— 6]	$162,000
Cost of new machine	(146,000)
Undepreciated cost of old machine	(30,000)
Advantage (disadvantage) of replacement	$(14,000)

Calculate the net benefit (cost) of purchasing the new machine

 

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Paper , Order, or Assignment Requirements

Respond to the questions below in a 4 (full) pages Word document.

ATN is a company that provides network equipment to telecommunications industries across the globe. Over the years, ATN has grown considerably, and their product portfolio has expanded to accommodate several acquisitions, including companies that specialize in infrastructure components for the Internet, GSM, and cellular providers. ATN is now a leading supplier of a diverse range of telecommunications infrastructure.
In recent years, market pressure has been increasing. ATN has begun looking for ways to increase its competitiveness and efficiency by taking advantage of new technologies, especially those that can assist in cost reduction.
Technical Infrastructure and Environment
ATNs various acquisitions have resulted in a highly complex and heterogeneous IT landscape. A cohesive consolidation program was not applied to the IT environment after each acquisition round, resulting in similar applications running concurrently and an increase in maintenance costs. In 2010, ATN merged with a major European telecommunications supplier, adding another applications portfolio to its inventory. The IT complexity snowballed into a serious obstruction and became a source of critical concern to ATNs board of directors.
Business Goals and New Strategy
ATN management decided to pursue a consolidation initiative and outsource applications maintenance and operations overseas. This lowered costs but unfortunately did not address their overall operational inefficiency. Applications still had overlapping functions that could not be easily consolidated. It eventually became apparent that outsourcing was insufficient as consolidation became a possibility only if the architecture of the entire IT landscape changed.
As a result, ATN decided to explore the potential of adopting cloud computing. However, subsequent to their initial inquiries they became overwhelmed by the plenitude of cloud providers and cloud-based products.
Roadmap and Implementation Strategy
ATN is unsure of how to choose the right set of cloud computing technologies and vendorsmany solutions appear to still be immature and new cloud-based offerings continue to emerge in the market.
A preliminary cloud computing adoption roadmap is discussed to address a number of key points:
IT Strategy – The adoption of cloud computing needs to promote optimization of the current IT framework, and produce both lower short-term investments and consistent long-term cost reduction.
Business Benefits – ATN needs to evaluate which of the current applications and IT infrastructure can leverage cloud computing technology to achieve the desired optimization and cost reductions. Additional cloud computing benefits such as greater business agility, scalability, and reliability need to be realized to promote business value.
Technology Considerations – Criteria need to be established to help choose the most appropriate cloud delivery and deployment models and cloud vendors and products.
Cloud Security – The risks associated with migrating applications and data to the cloud must be determined.
ATN fears that they might lose control over their applications and data if entrusted to cloud providers, leading to incompliance with internal policies and telecom market regulations. They also wonder how their existing legacy applications would be integrated into the new cloud-based domain.
To define a succinct plan of action, ATN hires an independent IT consulting company called CloudEnhance, who are well recognized for their technology architecture expertise in the transition and integration of cloud computing IT resources. CloudEnhance consultants begin by suggesting an appraisal process comprised of five steps:
A brief evaluation of existing applications to measures factors, such as complexity, business-criticality, usage frequency, and number of active users. The identified factors are then placed in a hierarchy of priority to help determine the most suitable candidate applications for migration to a cloud environment.
A more detailed evaluation of each selected application using a proprietary assessment tool.
The development of a target application architecture that exhibits the interaction between cloud-based applications, their integration with ATNs existing infrastructure and legacy systems, and their development and deployment processes.
The authoring of a preliminary business case that documents projected cost savings based on performance indicators, such as cost of cloud readiness, effort for application transformation and interaction, ease of migration and implementation, and various potential long-term benefits.
The development of a detailed project plan for a pilot application.
ATN proceeds with the process and resultantly builds its first prototype by focusing on an application that automates a low-risk business area. During this project ATN ports several of the business areas smaller applications that were running on different technologies over to a PaaS platform. Based on positive results and feedback received for the prototype project, ATN decides to embark on a strategic initiative to garner similar benefits for other areas of the company.

Answer the following questions in a substantive manner:

What drove ATN to consider using cloud computing?
Was cloud computing the right option for ATN considering their services and products? Why or why not?
What are some of the concerns that ATN has about cloud computing and are they justified? Why?

 

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Identify the greatest criticism of those who claim membership to either of the two major parties have of minor parties.

 

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