There are many local IT services that are used primarily on-site by employees, but also number of external ones that are provided globally for all locations. A global company, such as Case New Holland, has to keep in mind that that employees not only work at their designated locations, but also travels between offices and host external guest. The local internal IT infrastructure must be organically connected with the global IT infrastructure that is provided by headquarters. This paper tries to present all crucial IT services that have direct impact on the business process.
In addition, the same processes are considered from different perspectives, such as from the employee roles and office locations. Services There are plenty of various IT service that are required to run the business efficiently. However, some of them are absolutely critical and demand very high uptime, such as a corporate email. And some of them require a lot of storage space and sophisticated software to work with, such as corporate reports. Let’s list main services and outline how critical they are and what combination of software and hardware is required.
Service Description Importance Software Hardware Email Provides access to corporate email through a corporate client, browser or mobile High Exchange 2010, Outlook 2010, Farm of Dell PowerEdge blade servers with a hot stand by in another data center VPN Provides possibility to access corporate network from outside Medium Cisco VPN Cisco 3900 router File Sharing Provides access to a network share where employees can exchange files, Medium Windows Server Dell PowerVault Network Attached Storage ERP System Provides access to corporate financials, sales & marketing and customer relationship management.
High SAP Dell PowerEdge Reports Gives an environment to store various statistical data on the company for future analysis Medium MS SQL Dell PowerEdge It is a clear correlation between the hardware sophistication and the importance of the IT services. For example, the network is guarded by a high end Cisco router that is capable of providing many simultaneous outside connections through a secure VPN. If this office was a small standalone company than a simple router would suffice. However, in the global context, considering that the company employs thousands of people worldwide it is important that the infrastructure has no room for failure.
It is based on the fact that large companies have large costs associated with the downtime and it is safer or less risky to invest upfront in the enterprise class hardware then to spend much more lately in a midst of a crisis. The same goes for email, which is hosted on a farm of servers, which guarantees higher uptime compared to a one server solution. Email is a main information exchange method in a large enterprise and the uptime should strive to reach 100%, again considering costs of downtime for a large organization.
Having said this, the company is also cost conscious and does not spend same budgets on the hardware for internal purposes. It does not mean that internal services are less important, but simply reflects risk associated with every service. For internal services a reasonable downtime is provisioned for and is absolutely normal as it is not going to disrupt critical business processes. Employees and Roles Depending in the role employees require different hardware sets to access IT services of the company. Let’
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