ICTICT511 - IT Strategy: Security, Upgrade, and Environment Analysis

This report presents an IT strategy analysis, addressing key areas such as cost-benefit and SWOT analysis for business decisions. It discusses security implications related to unsupported Windows versions, outlining steps for risk mitigation, software inventory management, and legacy application handling. The report details procedures for upgrading disk capacity, including file deletion and hardware upgrades. It also identifies tools for monitoring and maintaining system security, such as Malicious Software Removal Tool, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, and UrlScal Security Tools. Furthermore, the document explores the influence of external factors like customer and competitive analysis, and internal factors such as resources and capabilities on strategic planning. Finally, it discusses the impact of technological evolution, emphasizing the roles of project managers and marketing perspectives. The report concludes with methods for monitoring CPU usage and achieving cost efficiency in server management. Desklib provides this and many other solved assignments for students.

Running head: IT STRATEGY
IT Strategy
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author Note

1IT STRATEGY
Answer to question number 1:
Cost-benefit analysis:
This method is helpful to analyze business decisions. Here, the benefits at any specific
situation or actions that are business related is been summed up. Next the cost related to the activities
are been subtracted. Here, some analysts and consultants have been also building the model in order
to put the dollar value over intangible items (McKeen & Smith 2014). The results of the assessment
determine whether the project turns to be financially feasible or whether any other project can be
pursued.
SWOT analysis:
This is applicable to management requirements and technical problems analyzing what the
entities can or cannot perform. This includes the internal and external factors. It uses the
environmental data for evaluating the organization’s position and finds out what has been assisting
the agency to accomplish the objectives (Dubey, 2016). It is also helpful to determine what
challenges are to be minimized or overcome for achieving the desired results.
Answer to question number 2:
ABC has needed to undertake various security implications to run over unsupported versions
of Windows on the network. The company undertakes some actions to assure that the cyber security
is addressed properly. It must also mitigate the risks of having unsupported software (Wilmore,
2014). The steps are as follows.
 Defining risk tolerance
 Managing software inventory

2IT STRATEGY
 Upgrading, retiring and replacing various unsupported software.
 Maintaining and establishing whitelists.
 Developing and enforcing policies for managing unsupported software.
Further, they must keep in mind, that the legacy applications and the servers has the liability that
can be compromised or weaken well-maintained networks. For this ABS can undertake the
following steps.
 Keeping track of every legacy applications and systems
 Isolating them from basic networks though complex access rules.
 Monitoring the use
Answer to question number 3:
In order to upgrade the disk capacity ABC must undergo various steps. They are listed
below.
Files and folders are needed to be deleted regularly from server files. This includes crash
reports, log folders and any folders that are not in use. There have been also world backups and plug-
in configuration folders (Morawska, 2014).
Next the disk spaces must be upgraded. As the disk spaces approaches the limits one can
submit the supporting ticket for getting 10 GB more that has been allocated to that server. Moreover,
extra space over the budget packages should added at any place on request through the support
tickets.

3IT STRATEGY
Here, the extra disk space should be requested prior the present allocation maxes iy and no
extra space can be freed up through deleting the connecting plugins or excess data to SQL and so
(Felter et al., 2015).
Answer to question number 4:
The various tools to be used in the current case are discussed below.
Malicious Software Removal Tool:
It is helpful to remove particular, prevalent malicious software from the machines. Microsoft
Baseline Security Analyzer:
It helps users and administrators to scan various local and remote machined to search the
missing security updates and security misconfigurations.
Microsoft Security Compliance Manager Tool (SCM):
This end-to-end solution accelerator has been helpful to manage, operate deploy and plan
security baselines for clients of Windows, Microsoft applications and server operating systems (Pang
et al., 2016).
UrlScal Security Tools:
It has been screening every incoming request to servers through filtering various requests that
has been lying on the basis of rules set by administrators.

4IT STRATEGY
Microsoft security essentials:
These can be downloaded freely from Microsoft has been easy to install. They have been
always keeping updates. This they have been ensuring the machines are protected by latest
technologies.
Answer to question number 5:
Factors applicable to external environment; and internal environment of the company are
listed below.
The external environments have been affected by customer analysis, competitive analysis,
market analysis and environmental analysis. The various sectors that has been getting affected
internally are resources like sales, profitability, product quality brand associations and so on. Further
the internal system also includes the capabilities such as goals to determine internal strategic
strengths, problem, uncertainties, weaknesses and many more (Luizelli et al. 2015).
Both the internal and external environments have been needed to be considered while
performing strategic planning. This is because they are needed to identify actual competitors and
substitutes, analyzing reaction patterns, strengths and weaknesses, strategies and objectives of the
competitors. Further, they are also helpful to select what competitors are needed to be avoided or
attacked.
Answer to question number 6:
The factors that might influence the way towards technological evolutions are dual role pr
project managers and perspective from marketing. As per as dual role is considered people managing
technological changes should be serving the technical implementers and developers. Organizations

5IT STRATEGY
developing the technology and handing off to users has been less technically skilled. Further they
have been quite knowledgeable regarding their sectors of application. However, organizations have
not been willing to undertake roles for the technology ar any point of the technological evolution.
In the marketing perspective the users involved in new technology design phase has been
boosting user satisfaction that has been quite well known, However, the type of user involvement,
timing and extents has been varying highly from business to business. Let, for instance the software
developers at ABC has deployed user design group for working with developers over strategically
piece of applications software as the program stays in stage of prototype. Here, the prospective users
should be trying out software over the same computer that has been employed by developers of the
programs (Pennefather, Bradshaw & Irwin, 2017). Here, the tight communication loop has been
allowing daily feedbacks from users for designers as per the problems and preferences.
Answer to question 7:
i. Tools to be used under Windows 2012 for monitoring CPU around the six game servers:
First of all AppOptics has been pulling double duty and the infrastructure and application that
has been monitoring tool. It has been the AppOptics providing instant visibility to server to deliver
custom metrics and analytics. Next, the Monitor.Us has been a cloud-based free server monitoring
tool from the TeamViewer. It has been providing the abilities to monitor services for Linux and
Windows servers for free.
ii.
Let the overall time taken be 100s.
Total CPU time since boot = 70% = 70 s

6IT STRATEGY
Total CPU Idle time since boot = 85% = 85 s
Minimum number of N1 servers required = = 85/70*10= 12.14 or 12.
For the servers, the cost efficiency can be achieved through analyzing the capacity versus
price or size efficiency. This determines how must capacity has been there to retrieve the expenses
for servers.

7IT STRATEGY
References:
Dubey, S. S. (2016). IT strategy and Management. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd..
Felter, W., Ferreira, A., Rajamony, R., & Rubio, J. (2015, March). An updated performance
comparison of virtual machines and linux containers. In Performance Analysis of Systems
and Software (ISPASS), 2015 IEEE International Symposium On (pp. 171-172). IEEE.
Luizelli, M. C., Bays, L. R., Buriol, L. S., Barcellos, M. P., & Gaspary, L. P. (2015, May). Piecing
together the NFV provisioning puzzle: Efficient placement and chaining of virtual network
functions. In Integrated Network Management (IM), 2015 IFIP/IEEE International
Symposium on (pp. 98-106). IEEE.
McKeen, J. D., & Smith, H. A. (2014). IT strategy: Issues and practices. Prentice Hall.
Morawska, E. (2014). Immigrant transnationalism and assimilation: a variety of combinations and
the analytic strategy it suggests. In Toward assimilation and citizenship: Immigrants in
liberal nation-states (pp. 133-176). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Pang, C., Hindle, A., Adams, B., & Hassan, A. E. (2016). What do programmers know about
software energy consumption?. IEEE Software, 33(3), 83-89.
Pennefather, S., Bradshaw, K., & Irwin, B. V. (2017). Design of a Message Passing Model for Use
in a Heterogeneous CPU-NFP Framework for Network Analytics. SATNAC.
Wilmore, A. (2014). IT strategy and decision-making: a comparison of four universities. Journal of
Higher Education Policy and Management, 36(3), 279-292.