Imagine Cup IT Competition Round 2 Part 2: Free-form Test
Instructions: In addition to the online test, you will need to complete the second part of the competition, a free-form written essay case study. This will require the creation of a business proposal. Your answer to this part will be in the form of a proposal where the judges are looking for answers that: Meet the Business Requirements Meet the Technical Requirements Are Technically Sound in their Recommendation Are Complete and Clear of What is Being Proposed
The Round 2 written case study will be scored as follows: 40% Analysis of options 30% Feasibility of recommendation 30% Clarity of written argument You will be able to use the Internet, review books or manuals, and gather materials to come up with your answers for the written case study portion. Remember that this is an individual competition and you should NOT share the questions with others. You should not collaborate with anyone to come up with your answers. Those found violating these rules will be disqualified immediately. The essay / case study details will be available on your My Imagine Cup page as a document download. Your final work must be submitted in Word DOC or RTF format and via e-mail to imaginecup@corp-events.com. Judging of round 2 submissions will take place after the close of round 2. Results will be released by the end of May.
Background
Trey Research (www.treyresearch.com) is a pharmaceutical company that researches, develops, and manufactures vaccinations. They have developed 5 competing influenza vaccinations to combat the potentially deadly H5N1 strain of the virus. There will be a large clinical trial with 100,000 patients to test the efficacy of the 5 vaccinations. A single vaccination will be chosen to be produced and rapidly manufactured to meet the impending threat of a pandemic. Medical staff will monitor the delivery of the vaccination and progress of the patients in the field. The results of the clinical trials will be analyzed centrally to determine the most effective vaccination. A large quantity of epidemiological and biometric information will be captured in the field to support the analysis.
The information needs to be available in a short span of time to be centrally evaluated. There will be a large set of data from the evaluation and intensive analysis of the results. The company wants to leverage technology to speed up the gathering of information from the field and the processing of the results. This information will be gathered electronically in the field and transmitted immediately. To support this requirement, there needs to be a large scale deployment of a new infrastructure to monitor the delivery of vaccinations to the 100,000 patients. Trey Research is a private company and their trade secrets must be protected. There will also be confidential medical information gathered during the clinical trial, which must be protected during storage or transmission. The security officer for Trey Research is particularly concerned with viruses and root kits, so all IT system must be protected. There will be large offices located in the San Francisco and Delhi. Analysis will take place in San Francisco and Delhi. The large offices will be connected with direct T3 connection for performance. Each of the large offices will have 500 employees. There will be small offices in 20 cities participating in the clinical trials. The small offices will be connected to both the San Francisco and Delhi offices via Internet VPN connection using their local T1 Internet connections. The smaller offices are: Cairo Shanghai Barcelona Dallas Caracas Cape Town Jakarta Rome Quebec Lima Bangkok Riyadh Berlin Bogota Calcutta Singapore Baghdad Mexico City Sao Paulo Nairobi
There will be 10 employees in each office and a team of 10 mobile medical staff to conduct the clinical trials. The medical staff will remain in the field and will need to connect to their office using Internet and wireless technologies.
System Requirements
The company wants to leverage technology to speed up the gathering of information from the field and the processing of the results. There needs to be a large scale deployment of infrastructure to monitor the deliver vaccination to the 100,000 patients. All services need to be specified as part of the design. There are no existing services, components, hardware, or software other than the network services (LAN, WAN and Internet). These services include: Directory Services Infrastructure Services File Services
Print Services Messaging Services Application Services Backup Services Database Services Desktop Services Mobility Services Perimeter Services Security Services
The company will be standardizing on the directory for authentication, access control and single sign on support. The directory needs to support all the other services while meeting the security requirements. The infrastructure needs to support the servers, workstations, and laptops. This includes naming services and automatic address assignment. The design should specify the network services being deployed and where they will be hosted. The file and print services are primarily for each local office. However, there are a number of company wide shares that are required to be available at all times. The files in these shares can be large and the solution needs to reduce the WAN overhead for users accessing these files. The company is planning to deploy an extensive Intranet application that needs to be available even in the even of a server outage. Messaging services are critical to the company to maintain communications within the company and with other organizations. The messaging services should be centralized at the San Francisco and Delhi offices, but users should be able to read and send messages even in the event of an Internet outage. Traveling users need to be able to access their messages from Internet Kiosks if that is all they have available. Some messages are confidential and need to be secured during transmission and storage even within the organization. In addition, some of Trey Research partners need to protect the confidentiality of messages transmitted between the organizations. There will be 10% of the total employees that will travel and need to use laptops. The rest of the employees will use desktops. The medical staff is concerned that laptops will be too large for their field work and need a smaller device. Security is critical and many of the mobile devices will contain proprietary information what needs to be protected. They will need to access the company network as remote nodes where they have high bandwidth. However, there are some cases where all they will need is access to email from kiosks in airports or coffee shops. There are also a number of dialup users whose connection will not support the traffic of running the line of business applications, but it is not acceptable that they not have access to the applications. The desktop will need to be deployed locked down with the latest desktop operating system and need to be centrally controlled to ensure that they remain locked down and updated. Methods for securing, monitoring and maintaining the desktops should be
included in the proposal. The new infrastructure proposal needs to address all the mobility needs. The security department has put into place several written security policies that dictate that all internal network traffic must have the integrity protected. They also want to standardize the application of security settings and audit them using the built in tools. The design and plan needs to include the specific methods by which this will be achieved. The security department also requires that all services be recoverable in the event of a component failure, so the design should include a backup specification and the methods for each service. The clinical trial data will need to be collected in the field at patients' homes and places of work. The medical staff gathering the data will need to have mobile devices they can use to gather the information, track their patients, and upload the information to the office. The information gathering process depends on the answers to previous questions, requiring an application to properly collect the information real-time. Biometrics will also be collected from the patients and uploaded via the devices. The biometric devices will support Bluetooth technology for rapid transfer of data to the devices. There will also need to be a publicly available web application to allow patients to view and update selected data. This will need to be secured and password protected to ensure patient confidentiality. The security officer is concerned about the directory security and has mandated that no patient user accounts may reside in the internal directory services. There will be an extensive data mining and numerical analysis performed on the data gathered from the field. This will require significant amounts of memory and processing power in the systems performing the analysis. The design should include provisions for high performance computing at the San Francisco and Delhi offices. The company has standardized on Microsoft technologies as a corporate standard. All operating systems, services and applications in the design should meet the standard. The company wants to use the latest versions of all Microsoft technologies in the new infrastructure to ensure that they have the most recent security enhancements and features.
Question #1
You are a System Engineer for Trey Research. You have been asked to create the design specification and deployment plan for new infrastructure. The CIO would like you to prepare the proposal for the new infrastructure. The proposal needs to include the following deliverables: Title Design Deliverable Narrative description of the design for the new infrastructure and the plan Length 5 pages minimum
Architecture Diagram(s) Plan Software Specification
Hardware Specification
to implement it. Diagram(s) of the design for the new infrastructure Project plan with major phases and steps List of required software to implement the new infrastructure List of required hardware to implement the new infrastructure
1 page minimum 1 page minimum 1 page minimum
1 page minimum
The design must include all components, servers, desktops, and software. It must include and identify all the components required to support the list of services. It must also include the specifications needed to meet the business and technical requirements. There should be specific methods in the design to address all the stated business and technical requirements. There should also be a naming convention for all components. The architecture diagram needs to include all physical components and their interconnections at all locations. The architecture diagram should also cover logical components and hierarchies. These may be supplied as separate diagrams. The deployment plan must include the phases and the high-level implementation steps to deploy the services. It should also include the required personnel with their roles and the number needed. The plan should also include a schedule for the complete deployment. The software specification should include the operating systems, servers and applications needed. It should include the number of licenses, versions, editions, and minimum service pack levels. The hardware specification should include the servers, storage, desktops and laptops needed to fully implement the architecture. This should include the processor, memory and disk requirements for all components.
Question #2
You are a System Administrator with Trey Research. You have been asked to create an IT Service Management plan for the maintenance, operations, and support of the new infrastructure. The organization will be heavily dependent on the new infrastructure and needs to ensure that the IT services are delivered and supported properly. The plan should include the following components: Title Support Plan Deliverable Plan for supporting the end users in the new infrastructure, including office staff and field Length 1 page minimum
Maintenance Plan
Change Management Plan Backup Plan
Training Plan
medical staff. Plan for maintaining the new infrastructure, including the servers, desktops and mobile devices. Plan for managing changes in the new infrastructure. Plan for ensuring effective backups of all devices and data in the new infrastructure. Plan for providing training to the staff on the usage of the new infrastructure, including office staff, medical staff, and IT staff.
1 page minimum
1 page minimum 1 page minimum
1 page minimum
The plans should include detailed requirements and specifications to meet the service level agreements. The plans should include the specific processes, schedules, tasks, checklists, and roles needed for the effective operation of each of the plans.