Assignment: Core Technology
During the spring term of 2017, DU (DENVER university) had at least two substantial network outages that affected student and staff use of widely used university applications such as Pioneer Web, the library's online resources, and Canvas. Both also killed the campus network connection to the public internet. In both cases, the applications and services remained available to users whose connection paths did not pass through the failed network elements. Thus, services hosted off campus (e.g. Canvas) continued to be available to users located off campus during the outages, and locally hosted services remained available to users on campus.
One of these outages was attributed to a failure of a networking device on the campus, another to a failure in the network connection to the ISP providing service to the campus. Clearly, the immediate need was to restore service; service restoration was handled efficiently by IT technical staff and the ISP involved within a few hours in each case.
In the longer term, a strategic evaluation needs to be made and a strategic decision taken: How do you think the campus IT leadership should respond to these outages? Does the campus have an adequate network connection today? Or is the network sufficiently important to the campus that an upgrade, possibly involving a second (redundant) network connection, is needed?
For this assignment, develop an analysis of both options and compare them. Your analysis should include a summary of likely impacts of each option on the largest user groups on campus. You do not have enough information to complete a proper financial analysis, but you should be able to think through the process and lay out arguments for both options that, when the data is available, will provide enough information to our CIO to make a decision. Present your arguments as a report to our CIO. Include enough supporting information from outside sources to justify your work in each case.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.