You're the Senior System Administrator $($SysAdmin$)$ for a small company of $44$ employees that does primarily 'job shop' work with machine tools manufacturing custom metal components for other manufacturers. The focus is on building custom tool bits using precision machining tools. GREAT NEWS just come in$!$ The company just acquired a competitor that also does machine coding to set up numerically and computer controlled instrumentation and manufacturing devices!! The company is going to grow in $10$ days once the deal closes.

Current Organization:

Front Office

Human Resources for $44$ people

Payroll for $44$ people

Invoicing for $200+$ customers

Administration for regulatory compliance $($no HAZMAT$)$

Engineering Office

Computer Aided Design$/$Drafting $($CAD$)$

Research and Development $($custom programming machine and development software required to be in a security enclave totally separate from the rest of the network$)$

Marketing

Regular computer users with laptops, not always connected to the network and usually on public WiFi or customer site WiFi while the sales force travels

Market research specialist with one high end desktop and a plotter to do marketing material master prints $($think posters to go out to a printer for advertising or big $\text{'}$in shop' displays with instructions on how to mount a tool bit$)$

Warehouse

Inventory Control

Ordering

Shipping

Production Floor

$15$ computer controlled machines including lathes, planers, drill presses, multihead CNC routers, etc

Future Organization adds:

$76$ new employees using new machine tools

$12$ new employees doing Human Resources, Payroll, and Administration $($NOT Invoicing or Customer Relationship Management $-$ we are keeping the new employees AWAY from money and customer lists to avoid industrial espionage!$)$

$27$ new machines that work in a secure enclave for software development

$10$ new computer controlled machines including lathes, planers, drill presses, multihead CNC routers, etc

Requirement: Write SHORT paragraphs using broad terms for the managing director who is NOT a computer person describing the major changes you think should be made. Do NOT use technical commands or jargon.

Using the required reading materials for the last three weeks, what major USER GROUPS would you want and what kind of employees would be in them?

Secure Enclaves are connected to the network, but not allowed to directly exchange data with other machines. You'll need to add an internal firewall to separate the groups. How many will be required and what would you name the internal segmented enclaves?

The current front office uses a small server and all the technical machines use high end servers for central management and storage. Remembering you MUST keep your production machines and code secure$,$ what will you recommend for the front office to increase performance and storage volume to handle the big increase in employee human resource activities and payroll? Buy new servers? Offload Human Resources and Payroll to third party service vendors? Move those functions to Software as a Service $($SaaS$)$ and Infrastructure as a Service $($IaaS$)$ leveraging something like Amazon Web Services $($AWS$)?$

When you're done, comment on ideas presented by at least two other classmates and get the party started!