IT Infrastructure Management: Data Analysis, Systems, and Case Studies

This assignment delves into IT infrastructure management, covering critical aspects such as data analysis, business risks, and the impact of IT on competitive advantage. The solution explores key concepts like Just-In-Time Delivery, E-commerce, SaaS, and strategic planning, alongside data mining elements and ERP functionalities. The assignment presents case studies of Liberty Wines and FinCEN, analyzing their IT challenges, upgrades, and the role of data analytics in detecting financial crimes, including money laundering. The analysis highlights the benefits of server virtualization, financial intelligence, and the identification of patterns critical to national security. The provided references support the analysis and findings, illustrating the practical application of IT infrastructure management principles.

Running head: IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT PG
IT Infrastructure Management PG
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s note

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Table of Contents
Answer 1..............................................................................................................................2
Answer 2..............................................................................................................................3
Answer 3..............................................................................................................................4
Answer 4..............................................................................................................................5
4.1 Business Risks faced by Liberty Wines.....................................................................5
4.2 Impact of Liberty Wines’ IT infrastructure on its Competitive Advantage..............5
4.3 Benefit of Server Virtualization on Liberty Wines and its Environment..................5
Answer 5..............................................................................................................................6
5.1 Data and IT problems that were limiting FinCEN’s ability to fight financial crime.6
5.2 IT upgrades and capabilities that are needed by FinCEN to achieve its mission......6
5.3 Financial Intelligence.................................................................................................6
5.4 Ability to identify patterns and relationships critical to national security.................6
5.5 Recent financial crimes that FinCEN has detected and disrupted. Explanation of the
role of data analytics in detecting crime..........................................................................7
References............................................................................................................................8

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Answer 1
Just-In-Time Delivery: It is a strategy used by various companies in order to reduce the
cost of inventory. This strategy helps to improve the efficiency and reduce the waste in the
inventory. This can be done by receiving the materials and good on the basis of the production
requirement and process.
E-Commerce: The full form of E-commerce is electronic commerce. This is an online
selling and purchasing process where all the transactions take place over the internet (Laudon &
Traver, 2013). The online shopping websites are an example ecommerce sites.
SaaS: Software as a Service is a service model of cloud computing. This model lets the
users to get connected to the applications that are cloud based and also allows using these
applications (Kavis, 2014). It is a software solution that is given the service provider of cloud.
Strategic Planning: This is a process of planning in a strategic manner in order to find out
the highest priority task, optimal management of resources, operations strengthening and to
motivate the employees to work efficiently towards a common goal (Cassidy, 2016).
Supply Chain Systems: This is a system that focuses on building supply chains that give
high performance (Stadtler, 2015). This includes optimization of operations and asset
management in every area of the company by using recent and advanced technology.
DSS: Decision Support System is an information system that integrates information and
data from various functional departments and helps the higher management staffs to take
decision. This system also consists of knowledge based system.

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Cloud Infrastructure: This is a type of virtual infrastructure. The products as well the
services that are provided by the cloud are provided through the cloud infrastructure (Tomás &
Tordsson, 2013). Cloud infrastructure includes all the software, hardware, storage and servers
that are required for supporting the needs of a cloud based model.
Web 2: Web 2 can be defined as the latest or second generation of technology as well as
the World Wide Web. The transition that took place from the HTML pages that are static in
nature to a dynamic web page can be referred to as Web 2. This allows open communication
among the communities of web based users.
Extranet: This is a type of private network that is allowed to be accessed by specific or
authorized outsiders. The business details of a company can be shared with the customers and
suppliers through the extranet.
Big Data Analysis: This is a process of analysis that gets an insight to the huge quantity
of data that is present. It allows finding any type of matching patterns, to analyze the driving
factors off revenue and for basic monitoring (Du, 2014). This helps the organization to
understand market trends and customer preferences in order to generate more revenue.
Answer 2
The key elements of data mining (Witten et al., 2016) are as follows:
 Increased data: In this era of technology, a company can get access to large
quantity of data with the help of information technology. In the earlier days this
process involved the participation of the customers.

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 Future prediction: This system has all information stored in it. This can help to
provide a correct prediction of the future by using the data mining tools.
 SQL: Many answers cannot be solved by simple or single pass SQL because it has
a lot of constraints associated with it. Data mining allows multi pass SQL.
 Decision making: The process of decision making has become easier and faster by
using data mining process.
 Customer behavior: Data mining can be used in order to determine the
preferences of the customers in order to generate better revenue and profit.
 Data structure: Information can be collected and stored. It has a complicated
structure of database.
 Incomplete data: When any survey is held then people do not disclose complete
information because they have a privacy concern.
Answer 3
The “Reserve Stock Level” function of ERP allows the warehouse of a company to keep
a reserved level of stocks for every sales order (Leon, 2014). It improves in the performance as
the stocks are managed in an effective manner. It helps in production planning by determining
the available quantity in a proper way. If the level of stock is properly determined by the ERP
system then it will help the company to generate profit and revenue by improving the
performance of the system. It also helps in determining the profit (Sustainment, 2014). The latest
year analysis can be done by closing stock.

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Answer 4
4.1 Business Risks faced by Liberty Wines
After the growth of business there were problems faced by the IT team because of huge
volume of data. Systems had become slow and the efforts for maintenance were more. This led
to the productivity loss and it had a negative impact on the business processes that are core.
Some of the business processes that were affected are inventory management and order
processing (Turban, Volonino & Wood, 2013). The customer services provided by them were
not satisfactory leading to loss of current as well as future businesses.
4.2 Impact of Liberty Wines’ IT infrastructure on its Competitive Advantage
There was huge impact of the IT infrastructure on the competitive advantage of the
company. The power, hardware replacement costs were reduced, resilient was improved and
stable backup system was installed. The speed of the business processes were improved by
enabling any application in order to run fast and provide high level customer service. There was
high and quick growth in the business. The employee productivity was improved. All these
points gave a competitive advantage over its competitors.
4.3 Benefit of Server Virtualization on Liberty Wines and its Environment
The virtualization of server led to the decrease in the number of servers. One server was a
sub part of the backup system and this led to the reduction in the usage of power. The cost of air
conditions were reduced by 60 per cent. The carbon footprint was reduced. Applications could
run at a fast pace because of virtualization of the server. This in turn helped to improve the
customer service process as well as inventory management. The cost of hardware was reduced

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by a huge amount. Virtualization also allows adding and removing servers without any complex
procedures.
Answer 5
5.1 Data and IT problems that were limiting FinCEN’s ability to fight financial crime
The quality was not consistent and there was lack of standardization and validation.
FinCEN faced issue in analyzing the data as they had access to small set of data. Data was
reported to different agencies through several offline systems (Turban, Volonino & Wood,
2013). This limited FinCEN from detecting and fighting against any financial crime.
5.2 IT upgrades and capabilities that are needed by FinCEN to achieve its mission
The upgrades of analytics capabilities are required as well as upgrades of the databases
and IT infrastructure. This is required for the purpose of collecting and analyzing data from
several sources in order to provide it to the law. Receiving processes in a digital form will help to
store and process reports. A web based app that is used to resolve any query will also led to the
improvement of the existing processes. All these will allow FinCEN to achieve its mission.
5.3 Financial Intelligence
Financial intelligence is dependent on the effective and efficient data analytics. This will
allow FinCEN to detect any pattern of potential criminal activity.
5.4 Ability to identify patterns and relationships critical to national security
The ability to identify patterns and relationships are critical to national security because it
helps to improve the speed and capability of detecting and preventing any illegal and criminal
activity.

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5.5 Recent financial crimes that FinCEN has detected and disrupted. Explanation of the
role of data analytics in detecting crime
The main crime that FinCEN has detected is money laundering. There are several
methods under data analytics like pattern recognition, behavior monitoring and profiling that
help to detect and prevent criminal activities.

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References
Cassidy, A. (2016). A practical guide to information systems strategic planning. CRC press.
Du, H. (2014). Big Data Analysis. Software Engineering Project. Software Engineering Project.
Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service models
(SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). John Wiley & Sons.
Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2013). E-commerce. Pearson.
Leon, A. (2014). Enterprise resource planning. McGraw-Hill Education.
Stadtler, H. (2015). Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and
advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Sustainment, A. (2014). Enterprise Resource Planning.
Tomás, L., & Tordsson, J. (2013, August). Improving cloud infrastructure utilization through
overbooking. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing
conference (p. 5). ACM.
Turban, E., Volonino, L., & Wood, G. (2013). Information technology for management:
Advancing sustainable, profitable business growth . Hoboken.
Witten, I. H., Frank, E., Hall, M. A., & Pal, C. J. (2016). Data Mining: Practical machine
learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann.