Question

Scenario: You have been hired as an IT consultant by an entrepreneur starting a small advertising company called MilleniAds. As a start-up, your client’s company is relatively small and has a limited budget. There are only 10 employees, including a few creative directors, graphic designers, sales staff, a financial accountant, and an office administrator, with the entrepreneur acting as CEO. The current IT budget cannot exceed $25,000 and ideally should come in as far under that number as possible. MilleniAds will produce customized sales flyers, brochures, and other branded items, such as letterhead and business cards, that apply a youthful, fresh perspective targeting millennial demographics. Therefore, the company needs the ability to store and manipulate digital images and to produce physical copies of their products for their clients. The CEO wants to keep track of inventory, sales, and expenses digitally, but she does not anticipate having very complex records for the first year. She projects having only a dozen or so accounts but hopes to scale up in the coming years. It would be ideal to have a simple and user-friendly system for sharing information and files between employees. Many of the employees are millennials themselves who have indicated that their current desktop PCs are limiting their capabilities and that they prefer using their phones and other mobile devices for their professional and personal responsibilities. Two of the 10 employees will operate primarily outside of the office, soliciting business from regional firms, and they will need to access company information while on the road, in their home offices, and at customer sites. Beyond the specific information given above, you have the ability to fill in the gaps with assumptions or additional details that will make your final project unique and meaningful to you. If you have any questions, reach out to your instructor for guidance.

II. Hardware Components A. Examine the business’s issues to determine specific hardware requirements. Based on these issues, what are the major categories and components of hardware that should be considered? Identify each of the applicable requirements (hard drive storage, video cards, etc.), being sure to cite specific examples wherever appropriate. B. Then, compare and contrast the various options for meeting the requirements. Be sure to cite specific evidence from the component specification fact sheets to support your evaluation. What are their functional strengths and weaknesses? How do they compare in terms of cost and maintainability? C. Compose a final list detailing all of your specific hardware recommendations for your client. Be sure to logically justify your proposal as the best possible choice for meeting the business requirements.

Answer 1

A. Examine the business’s issues to determine specific hardware requirements. Based on these issues, what are the major categories and components of hardware that should be considered? Identify each of the applicable requirements (hard drive storage, video cards, etc.), being sure to cite specific examples wherever appropriate.

Ans : Even though the company is in its initial stages of growth with time and with the increasing customers they will definitely need to scale up their data storage needs. It is definitely better to have a sufficient storage in-order to avoid further problems of scaling up the storages which can sometimes be more expensive and can lead to loss of data. Having a reliable storage solution can lay a strong foundation to the growth of the company.Since it is mentioned that two people in the organisation travel and work outside the office an online storage can act as an efficient solution that can be easily scalable, accessible and secure. Having a remote online storage has a huge set of benefits like large files can be easily shared with clients, partners and others via a password-protected access which can be accessed through any device with a decent internet connectivity. A hard drive storage will have many limitation that the online storage solution overcomes.

B. Compare and contrast the various options for meeting the requirements. Be sure to cite specific evidence from the component specification fact sheets to support your evaluation. What are the functional strengths and weaknesses? How do they compare in terms of cost and maintainability?

Deciding between the Cloud vs on-premise data storage has always been the primary concern. With the cost of hardware, power consumption and physical space needed to implement on-premise storage, the Cloud is far less of an initial financial investment, especially for businesses with smaller data needs. Another factor that makes cloud storage more effective is that it requires less maintenance as compared to an on-premise system.Installation of an on-premise servers includes expenses such as electricity cost, regular maintenance and most important is that it must be upgraded regularly to ensure optimal performance and reliability. The average cost of repairing or upgrading a server can vary depending on the specification and are often high as compared to on-cloud storage. Considering the fact that many clod storages provide some limited free storage for certain GB's but coming to the fact that with time as the business expands TB's of data needs to be stored and cloud storage can be more expensive as compared to on-premise storage but the extra cost is worth the high speed, easy scalability and lesser maintenance effort.

C. Compose a final list detailing all of your specific hardware recommendations for your client.

The final listing of the specific hardware requirements must include definitely the infrastructure cost for setting up a business that must include the basic office requirements of chairs , tables and a personal PC to work on for the employees working from the office Since the company converts digital images to physical images the printing devices must be available to suitably perform the printing.From the above discussion it was found out that the on-premise storage proves to be cheaper when huge amount of data needs to be stored but looking at the other aspects the on cloud storage proves to be much highly effective and hence depending on the total budget of the company the money a huge chunk of the initial budget must be spent on the hardware storage devices purchase, shipping and installation or on the purchasing of cloud storage.