Impact of Information Technology at PAS

1.Discuss how each department uses Information technology, what hardware equipment are required including the network devices. Explain the function of each device

2.Specify the Operating Systems and application software required for data Communication between the clients and servers for each department. Justify your answer. 

3.Explain the function of each layer of the Internet Model.

4.Use the Internet model with the support of diagrams to explain how the messages are moved between the layers when an Employee sent an email form a PC at the Market department to the Manager at the Sale Department.

5.Discuss the kind of Networks used for PAS. Justify your answer.

6.Propose with justification the type of application architectures that would appear to be the most beneficial to the Human Resources Department.

The aim of this project is to discuss the impact and the structure of the information technology system at the PAS Company. PAS is an Australian company which was established in 1990 in the service of delivering packages overnight. With the increment in the business volume and growth PAS developed different branches in Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. The Sydney office is mainly responsible for the data processing. For communication among different offices and for data analysis Information technology is required and should be designed in an advanced way.

This report explains about the impact of the IT system, hardware and software specifications, and network details used at PAS. Several types of PAS networks are given with details in this report. Internet layers are also discussed with the idea behind sending emails among different internet layers. This report also proposes an architecture model about the human resource department of PAS.

Information technology is an important tool to analyze data and maintaining records of an organization. As PAS has a service of delivering to people, PAS needs a responsive website that can connect with people faster and in a better way (Baihaqi & Sohal, 2013). IT can help to make a well structured network system that can help the company to connect with people as well as to communicate among the employees of the organization. The organization has many departments and to make a good communication among them proper networking is required. Information technology also helps the organization by utilizing cloud computing, big data analysis methods to analyze data and completing tasks in more efficient way. More advanced architecture helps to make the working environment more fluent and advanced (Chudík et al., 2013). Therefore Information technology has a huge impact on the PAS Company for bringing automation, protection to information in the organization and to provide more customer satisfaction.

Hardware specifications and functions

For making the information technology system more efficient in the organization need of advance computer system is required. The company wants to implement a centralized database for billing and it consists of an Apple computer of model no. I Mac MK442HN/A. It has a LED screen of 21.5 inches for better display (Jahns & Lee, 2014). It consists of 8GB RAM, Intel Core i5 processor with 2.8GHz processing speed. It has a 1TB Hard disk memory and the hardware is of Mac platform. The processor functions for analyzing the data in a better speed and with accuracy. The memory is enough to make the database of the billing section of the company and also to store several files (Jia et al., 2014). The other computers used in the company also use Intel based processor with more or less same features as mentioned.

Networking is an important part of the computing system to make the connections among the computers. Main networking device switch are used in the computing system are Network hub, Network switch, Modem, Network router, Bridge, Repeater. Network hub is used to connect different network hosts and to transfer data (Kasemsap, 2015). Network switch is also used as the layer of a LAN and it is more specific in case of transferring the data to a particular port. A modem is used to modulate and demodulate the data to convert from digital to analog form for transmitting through the wires. In this organization D-Link Modems, hubs and switches are used.

The apple computer consists of the IOS operating system and the other Intel based computers have windows 10 as the operating system. The main centralized billing system requires different application software like Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, word, and outlook. Other applications like Calculators, Paint, Adobe reader, Calendars are used also. Google chrome, Firefox and Microsoft edge are used as the browsing software. Microsoft email and Gmail are used as the application to handle the mails (Min et al., 2014). Cortana is special application software that is only available in case of windows 10. In case of IOS platform Siri is used as special application for voice communication. In case of IOS platform Safari is used as the internet browser and there are G-maps, spotlight, i-Tunes, i-Books for using media files and transfer them through internet.

Internet layer is a collection of several protocols, methods and specifications for working in the Internet protocol suite that is used to transfer data from the host to destination host through different boundaries. Internet layers are mainly used to select the gateway for transmitting the outgoing data packets. It also captures the data packet using appropriate transport protocol and links. Internet model layers also detect the errors and diagnose it (Nakayama, 2014). In PAS Internet layers like IPV4, ICMP are used mainly. IP refers to the internet protocol and ICMP refers to the Internet Control Message Protocol. The Internet Protocol Security or IPSec is also used to provide the security through IP communications by authenticating and encrypting the data packets which are transported through the internet layers. Internet layers are the fundamental elements of the communication among different departments in this organization

Software specifications for the clients and servers

Figure 1: Different layers of Internet model

(Source: Zhou, Zheng & Wu, 2015).

All the departments and specially the Human resource department of the PAS need a very reliable communication system to transfer the e-mails. In case of sending the emails, it  can be considered as data packet that is to be transmitted from the host computer to the receiver or target computer. Now there are different Internet layers used to transfer the information. First the email is sent to the Application layer or HTTP (Patterson & Hennessy, 2017). Then it is sent to the Transport later (TCP). Then the Network layer or Internet Protocol layer transfer the data packet from the Transfer layer to the Data Link layer. Ethernet is used as the data transfer channel between the Data link layers of the host system and the receiver system. Again the previous process is done in the reversed order. Thus the data packet is transferred to the target computer through Network, Transport and Application layers respectively.

There are various types of networks used in PAS. Networking lines are important for transmitting the data from the host to the target computer. Different network lines which are used in the PAS are Twisted Pair, Fiber Optic cables, Coaxial cables (Stanley et al., 2016).

In this section the architecture of the Internet protocol system is proposed. The internet layer must contain the IPV4 protocol to transfer data more secured in fast way. The transaction of the data depends upon the framework designed in the architecture of the system. The architecture contains Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data link and Physical layers as the basis of the transmission model (Zhou, Zheng & Wu, 2015). Advanced algorithms are also used to make the transmission line more responsive. The information transmitted through the network system must be encrypted to maintain the security of the organization.

Figure 2: Architecture of the network model

(Source: Stanley et al., 2016).

Conclusion

From the above discussion it is concluded that the PAS Company is becoming more dependent on the Information technology system. For communicating the departments and keeping the records of the information applications of the computing system is needed with proper network devices and software. Different hardware and software features are discussed with specifications. The network system is also discussed with an architecture proposed with the networking system.

• It is recommended to set the computing system as mentioned in the report with the given specifications.
• The network system should be also designed in the structured as mentioned.
• It is important to encrypt the information to increase the security of the organization.

References

Baihaqi, I., & Sohal, A. S. (2013). The impact of information sharing in supply chains on organisational performance: an empirical study. Production Planning & Control, 24(8-9), 743-758.

Chudík, J., David, G., Kotov, V. E., Mirenkov, N. N., Ondas, J., Plander, I., & Valkovskii, V. A. (2013). Algorithms, software and hardware of parallel computers. Springer Science & Business Media.

Jahns, J., & Lee, S. H. (2014). Optical Computing Hardware: Optical Computing. Academic press.

Jia, Y., Shelhamer, E., Donahue, J., Karayev, S., Long, J., Girshick, R., … & Darrell, T. (2014, November). Caffe: Convolutional architecture for fast feature embedding. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Multimedia (pp. 675-678). ACM.

Kasemsap, K. (2015). The role of information system within enterprise architecture and their impact on business performance. Technology, innovation, and enterprise transformation, 262-284.

Min, B., Do Yi, S., Lee, K. M., & Goh, K. I. (2014). Network robustness of multiplex networks with interlayer degree correlations. Physical Review E, 89(4), 042811.

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Patterson, D. A., & Hennessy, J. L. (2017). Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface. Morgan kaufmann.

Stanley, N., Shai, S., Taylor, D., & Mucha, P. J. (2016). Clustering network layers with the strata multilayer stochastic block model. IEEE transactions on network science and engineering, 3(2), 95-105.

Zhou, Y., Zheng, X., & Wu, W. (2015). Effect of local information within network layers on the evolution of cooperation in duplex public goods games. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 78, 47-60.