Project Plan Inception



Project Plan Inception

Section 1: Project Introduction

I have been newly appointed as a CIO of a major data collection and analysis firm, and have been assigned the responsibilities to create a comprehensive project plan. The project is aimed at fulfilling the expansion needs of. The company started its operations two years back, and is expected to face approximately 60% growth over the period of next 18 months. This paper discusses the current situation of the company, the project plan for expanding the current IT infrastructure, and finally cloud computing and security measures for it.

Current Situation

Currently, the company relies heavily on the Web analytics tools, and operational systems. The major goal of the company is to improve and expand the existing information technology infrastructure, as this would help the company in improving its efficiency (Rainer & Turban, 2008). As this is a new company, it does not have advanced or well established IT infrastructure. The office is just spread over one floor, which expected to expand over three floors in the next 6 months. The company has a small staff consisting of 20 members, from which 4 are dedicated for IT department.

Current Information Technology Capacity

The company currently has a limited information technology infrastructure. However, the capacity of the company is just sufficient to fulfill current data collection and analysis needs.

Operational Systems and Databases

The company currently relies on MS Access for its data storage purposes. MS Access suits well for the current business needs. The operational systems mainly include normalized databases designed on Access. The current OLTP systems of the company optimize the process of transaction management.

Analytics and Interfaces

The company utilizes analytics tools to filter out meaningful data from the collected information. The information systems deployed in the company provide the employees with easy to use and friendly interfaces.

Infrastructure and Security

The company has applied security standards to its entire current information technology infrastructure. These security standards comply with the security guidelines, provided by the international standards, such as ISO, for all the company's hardware and software infrastructure. As the business processes of company mainly rely on electronic systems, known as e-business systems, the standard tools help in the prevention of hazardous activities such as fraud, information loss, data theft, and errors.

One of the main technologies which the company uses for securing its data and IT infrastructure is encryption. Using encryption technologies, it is possible to secure the passwords, messages, files (Tiwari, 2011). The company sends and stores information of any form (message, data, file, business records, and decisions) in scrambled form. This technology is highly promising for providing the information security benefits to the company, as even if a hacker finds any business secret, he will not be able to discover the hidden business secret due to the use of underlying computer algorithms and complex mathematical formulas.

Cloud Computing

As the CEO is interested to deploy cloud computing technologies for the expanded infrastructure, the development team would base the software design suing cloud ...