CIS3003 2013 Assignment 3
Description Marks out of Wtg(%) Due date
Assignment 3 100 30% Due Data 24/05/2014
There are two (2) parts to the third assignment. For part A (80%) need to write a single report not more than 20 pages in the body. For part B (20%) you need to present the report in Power Point with voice overlay of the report to the management. Read the section describing the formatting requirements for the assignment carefully.
Report Part A (80%): Mobile Systems, Virtualization and Clouds
Our organisation, after implementing mobile services the process of moving to the final cloud solution has discovered that a lot of the expected benefits have not been achieved. While the staff agree and can see how the new untethered access to business data and services can help in their day to day activities. The overhead of using the services due to authentication has resulted in poor acceptance of the system by the employees.
The security mechanism was imposed to limit the likelihood of having long term connections running from external connections. The limitations were put in place to minimise the load on the connection servers and also limit the possibility of unauthorised external entity not being identified early by the intrusion detection systems. The organisation has a large number of external business entities who regularly connect to the organisation resources as part of cooperative business processes.
After discussion with the system users a number of issues were discovered. Firstly, the system was designed so that the security management was pushed onto the mobile devices making the use of the service disruptive to the users. The accessing of different services while using mobile devices required a separate login in to each service. Not only that, but prolonged inactivity would shut down the connection to the mobile device requiring a twostep process to re-establish a connection to the device then reconnection to the service. Also it was discovered that while the system is supposed to support roaming in reality only certain services were accessible from different part of the organisation while utilising wireless devices.
The planned eventual move to the recommended cloud services has also been put on hold due to the current reports in the media of the Transport Layer vulnerability. The general consensus amongst the board of managers is that the cloud solutions may not be suitable or secure enough for their business requirements. As a result the idea of creating our own private cloud storage solution with virtualised servers to minimise the hardware requirements and management might be a better and a more secure solution.
The organisation grew up at a fairly fast rate and has moved through a number of IT solutions over the years. All the solution have been home grown and designed in house to meet the know challenges. As a result the solutions tended to be only short lived forcing a redesign in a shorter period than originally planned. For the next major redesign (the planed private cloud and virtual servers) the organisation is considering going through a tender process in the hopes of designing system that is better able to meet the future needs.
You have been tasked with writing a report to explain and explore the following technology and services:
a) There is evidently a problem with the current design in that the use of the wireless devices is more burdensome then it needs be and the access limitations the employees are experiencing. Describe the possible design problems and discuss possible solutions to make the current design more productive to the organisation?
b) Research and describe Transport Layer Security (TLS) and how it operates to provide secure communications. Report your findings in the operations of TLS and its impact if we were to move to a private cloud as suggested. Are we as an organisation going to be able to make ourselves more secure and better able to protect from unauthorised access.
c) Building a private cloud storage and virtual service type solutions sounds like a solution that provides the best of both world. Research and report on the advantages and disadvantages in building our own cloud and virtualised service type solutions. Make a recommendation with justifications as to how they should proceed (private or public type of solution)
d) Up to now the organisations IT department has been able to meet the challenges of designing and implementing the necessary communication networks for the organisation. However with the new design (private or public cloud) the IT department is venturing into areas where they lack experience. As possible solution the idea of tendering the build through Request for Proposal process has been raised. You have been asked to do brief analyses of the Request for Proposal process and highlight the benefits and the pitfalls of the process. The management is especially interested in what they need to get right in order to have the best guarantee if success.

Report Part B (20%): Presentation of the Report Power Point Voice Over
You are to prepare and present the major finding of the report to the management. The presentation will consist of a Power Point presentation with voice over on the slides highlighting the reports major finding for the research areas in Part A. The report is not to be of more than 12 minutes in duration. Because of the time constraint you will have to make sure you focus only on the major issues and information recorded on the report.
Note: If you don’t know how to do voice or voice annotations on power point slides please follow these links for a quick example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uk4CU7uobM and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdJSPW05Rrg. Just a few of the resources available and might slightly varied due to the version of PPT you may have access to.
Please read the next section very carefully.
Format for Assignment 3
Your report MUST follow the structure for a report as specified in the Faculty of Business Communications skills handbook, however, you will not be required to submit the following sections: Glossary, or Appendices. You may want to consider the structure of the marking scheme when structuring the body of your report.
Your report must include references where you have used other sources (both in the body text and listed at the end of the report) as specified in the Communication skills handbook. For current reference style guide please refer to the document online at http://www.usq.edu.au/library/help/referencing/harvard Work submitted with no references in the body of the report will NOT be accepted.
Your report must be printed with 1.5 line spacing; at least 12-point font size; and the body of the report should be no more than 20 pages of single-sided A4 paper. Penalty will apply for exceeding the page limit.
Assignments not following the report style will be heavily penalised.
WIKIPEDIA is not considered a suitable reference source and its use in referencing is strongly discouraged. You should not have it as a reference in the assignment.
The assignment is to be submitted using the EASE system which will be made available for that purpose a week before the due date.

Important Referencing guide
Please refer to the USQ Library web site for referencing guides in the Harvard style. Go to http://www.usq.edu.au/library/referencing > and click on ‘What is referencing’ under the ‘Reference’ heading. This provides details on the referencing of print and electronic publications. This is a must. Failing to correctly reference your sources will result in submitted work being penalized severely.