Improving a Company’s IT Infrastructure as a SysAdmin— Sales Company (Part II)
Hello!
This post is inspired by the Google IT Support Professional Certificate — System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services section.
In the final project, we are requested to provide consultation as a system administrator. Here, I make public how I would approach the pain points of this fictional company.
Feel free to think about how you would tackle this scenario and share with me your thoughts. There is always room for improvement.
Sales Company
W.D. Widgets is a small company that sells widgets. They’re mostly made up of salespeople who work with lots of clients. You’ve taken over as the sole IT person for this company of 80–100 people.
When HR tells you to provision a machine for a new employee, you order the hardware directly from a business vendor. You keep one or two machines in stock, in case of emergency. The users receive a username that you generate for them. You then give them an orientation on how to log in when they start.
You currently manage all of your machines using Windows Active Directory. The company uses only Windows computers. When a new computer is provisioned, you have to install lots of sales-specific applications manually onto every machine. This takes a few hours of your time for each machine. When someone has an IT-related request, they email you directly to help them.
Almost all software is kept in-house, meaning that you’re responsible for the email server, local machine software, and instant messenger. None of the company’s services are kept on the cloud.
Customer data is stored on a single file server. When a new salesperson starts, you also map this file server onto their local machine, so that they can access it like a directory. Whoever creates a folder on this server owns that folder and everything in it. There are no backups to this critical customer data. If a user deletes something, it may be lost for everyone.
The company generates a lot of revenue and is rapidly growing. They’re expecting to hire hundreds of new employees in the next year or so, and you may not be able to scale your operations at the pace you’re working.
My answer:
The first issue to be tackled is saving time and avoiding installing applications manually onto every machine. We can automate this process by using Group Policy, a feature present in Active Directory.
Group policy is a good tool as it allows to assign applications for a specific user or group of people present in an Organizational Unit. Therefore, it is possible to assign a program to users or computers to be downloaded when a user logs in to the computer or when the computer is turned on.
Besides that, it is needed to create a plan to move some services into the cloud. There is a risk in keeping everything on-site in case of a failure or disaster. The work will be disrupted and getting the work back to normal will take more time until the local problem has been solved. Keeping things in the cloud is the same as having another place holding our system, so in case of a disaster, we will still have access to our email server and instant messenger for example.
In addition to that, considering cloud services is something needed not only for daily operations but also to keep data saved and avoid the risk of losing all the customer data. Cloud Service Providers will have a structure to avoid clients from losing all the data as they offer the option of backing up from one cloud location to another when they face a disaster.
Another critical issue is the access of customer data file servers to new employees. This data should be considered critical and have restricted access. As many people have access to a directory, many problems are expected to happen since a mistake done by someone could be irreversible. The solution is to create a group and grant access to this data and only be added to this group those users who need to manipulate this file server.
Moreover, it is needed to implement a backup plan for the customer data and other critical data that could cause problems in case they are lost. As a backup was never done, at first it should be done a full backup and after that choose what would be the ideal type of backup for future changes, incremental or differential.
It is important to consider the drawbacks associated with incremental backups when it comes to data recovery after a disaster, so perhaps a differential one will be a better choice when downtime is unacceptable and recovery needs to be fast. However, still there are downsides with differential backup when data size is considered. Therefore, it is needed to consider the best one for this company after evaluating it more in-depth.
Thank you for reading.
I would love to hear how this can be improved from your perspective. Feel to share with me.
#SystemAdministrator #ComputerNetworking #Cisco #CCNA #ActiveDirectory #Microsoft
