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Running head: CEO'S CHALLENGE 0

CEO's Challenge

To: William Joe

From: W

Date: 07/28/2020

Subject: CEO's Challenge

Introduction

Techdrivers must identify a robust solution to avoid the negative impacts of shadow IT. With technological advancements and a generational change of employees, the workplace has significantly evolved in the recent past. In the past decade, business apps and platforms were developed to achieve this objective. From knowledge management systems and enterprise social networks to chat apps, businesses have a broad range of solutions to enhance collaboration, productivity and communication in the workplace. Nevertheless, the high number of solutions creates an overload and data dispersion with workers utilizing a significant amount of time switching between tools to identify and extract the information they require. For this reason, while Techdrivers is a transport and logistics that allow remote access to its information system and allows users to use their own devices and applications, it is facing a significant overload and data dispersion (Li, Xu, Wang & Wang, 2012). Furthermore, because of the high number of unmanaged devices and apps, the company is facing a high risk of cyber-attacks from unauthorized information system access. Therefore, the company must establish a solution that can facilitate system and network access management to continue allowing BYOD (bring your own device) and remote access services.

Proposed Information System

With a high number of employees working from remote locations, Techdrivers needs a robust solution, such as Splunk, which can enhance monitoring of activities within the organization’s system and network to enhance incident prevention, identification, response and reporting. The increasingly high number of consumer apps, including messaging applications and social media, affects every aspect of day-to-day life. In this regard, it has become increasingly important for organizations to offer the right tools to fulfill the high expectations and growing demands of the workforce. However, an organization requires a technology that can facilitate identity and security management to benefit from the high number of consumer applications and support remote access (Avalle, 2019). Therefore, Techdrivers requires a solution, such as Splunk, which facilitates log file and data management, hence improve information system and network access to reduce the impacts of shadow IT.

Functions Important to the Business

By reducing the impacts of shadow IT, the proposed system has tremendous potential to improve in the entire supply chain of Techdrivers. For instance, while the system is expected to significantly reduce incidents and enhance log management to improve information system availability and performance, it will be possible for the company to effectively manage and coordinate field activities. Currently, Techdrivers does have an automated log management system, and system administrators and the cyber-security team must conduct manual monitoring, aggregation, analysis and reporting logs. Because Techdrivers is transport and Logistics Company with many employees and customers remote locations, it is impossible for the company to control system access. In this regard, with high number of user devices and applications accessing the enterprise system, the organizations suffers a wide range of downtimes emanating from security incidents and reduced processing speed of requests. Therefore, with the new system, Techdrivers will experience significant improvement in the management of transport and logistics activities, hence financial performance.

With Splunk, which yields adequate system integration and interaction between departments, Techdrivers is expected to realize substantial improvement in communication and sales services. For example, while the system will enhance interactions between departments, techdrivers will realize a significant reduction in order processing overheads. While the current information system is coordinated at the IT department, hence does not allow direct communication between departments, because of security concerns, order processing, which requires departmental level interactions, can take several days or weeks. In this regard, the proposed system, by improving departmental interactions, security and information system performance will considerably reduce order processing overheads (Goel & Bhargava, 2016). Because Splunk includes high-level automation of services, Techdrivers will experience an upsurge in the number of orders processed per unit time and the number of order requests because of enhanced customer satisfaction.

Data Management

Techdrivers should consider deploying the Splunk software, which is one of the ideal solutions for log data management, to achieve its current and future goals and objectives. In the context of supporting broader business objectives and troubleshooting, log data, which can be defined as definitive register of events in every organization, agency or business, is a resource that yet to adequately tapped. The software can facilitate impromptu queries and report presentation on the full set of historical data even without the support from third-party reporting software. By providing flexible access to.CSV, which includes field-specific data, relational databases or all other enterprise data repositories, such as Hadoop, NoSQL, the software offers considerable log data enrichment. Splunk also improves log management use cases, including security log consolidation and retention, Troubleshooting of IT operations and applications, security, and compliance reporting (Sigman & Delgado, 2016). Therefore, while the software enhances system availability, especially by minimizing cyber-attacks and improving the performance of different operational services, Techdrivers can support both remote and on-site access to the information system with minimal shadow IT-related interferences.

Data Types

The proposed Splunk software accepts the following three categories of data types:

Category 1: .csv data

Category2: json data

Category 3: log data

Figure 1. Title (Source of data: user simulations)

Storage Methods

While the organization supports remote access, the organization will need highly available and visible data repositories to support operations. In this regard, the company should consider deploying cloud-based storage, including public and private clouds. Because the private cloud allows the organization some level of control, it should be reserved for the mission-critical data and system. The public cloud, which provides explicit management control to the cloud service provider, it should be reserved for the less mission-critical services (Li, Xu, Wang & Wang, 2012). The organization can also consider deploying onsite repositories for highly confidential data and systems. Therefore, the organization can ensure improved information security at a considerably reduced cost.

Data Quality

Splunk software can consolidate and index any machine and log data, such as structured and unstructured logs, and complex multi-line application. The software significantly improves gathering, indexing, searching, visualizing, analyzing, correlating, storage and reporting of data generated from specific machines to identify and address operational and security issues in a quick, replicable and cheaper approach. Furthermore, the Splunk provides significant data enrichment by supporting impromptu queries on historical data.

The transition of System Functions

The organization should consider an incremental approach to adopting the new solution. In particular, the organization should start by migrating the less mission-critical data and systems into the public cloud followed by the mission-critical data and systems to the system cloud. Lastly, the system should consider scaling down the in-house system and integrating all the systems to ensure seamless interactions between different components and users.

Evidence of Feasibility

Techdrivers can consider deploying LogDA, which is an alternative log management system, with substantial capacity to enhance log monitoring, aggregation, analysis and reporting. While the system is container-oriented, it is highly portable and substantially improves the speed of processing user requests (Kushida, 2019). Nevertheless, because containers have a relatively reduced capacity of interaction with other system instances, it is difficult to deploy them in a hybrid infrastructure, including different private, public cloud and in-house platforms (Pahl, Jamshidi & Zimmermann, 2020). In this regard, an organization must deploy the system on an in-house, or the private cloud, or public cloud. For the in-house platform, the organization must substantial investment on information system management and infrastructure, including hardware and software, and network equipment. On the other hand, while cloud hosted services are relatively cheap, they involve third-parties who can significantly compromise information security. For this reason, because Techdrivers cannot afford the cost of deploying well-equipped data center for an in-house solution, it must consider Splunk, which implements both containers and services, hence can be deployed on hybrid platforms. Assuming that a well-equipped data center involves 30, 000 USD deployment cost and another 3000 USD per month cost of maintenance, small companies, such as Techdrivers, cannot afford purely in-house hosted solution. On the other hand, the company cannot deploy a purely cloud-hosted solution because of security concerns. Therefore, with Splunk, which can be deployed on a hybrid infrastructure, Techdrivers can reduce the cost of the log management solution to monthly subscriptions or on demand service request payments, which may not exceed 200 USD per month.

References

Avalle, G. (2019). Software Development and Data Science: depict and monitor application usage-Big Data analytics software development with Splunk (Doctoral dissertation, Politecnico di Torino).

Pahl, C., Jamshidi, P., & Zimmermann, O. (2020). Microservices and Containers. Software Engineering 2020.

Li, S., Xu, L., Wang, X., & Wang, J. (2012). Integration of hybrid wireless networks in cloud services oriented enterprise information systems. Enterprise Information Systems, 6(2), 165-187.

Sigman, B. P., & Delgado, E. (2016). Splunk Essentials. Packt Publishing Ltd.

Kushida, T. (2019, November). Distributed Logging Service with Distributed Hash Table for Cloud. In International Conference on Internet of Vehicles (pp. 158-173). Springer, Cham.

Goel, A., & Bhargava, P. (2016). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/909,693.