CIS 505 Discussion Student Response

See attached

CIS505 Discussion post responses.

Respond to the colleagues posts regarding:

· In the past few weeks, you’ve been “consulting” on the various networking technologies. As a manager, you will need to know how to evaluate the recommendations of the people on your team, many of whom may be more qualified than you to decide the best course of action. You must have a working knowledge of how the various technologies work. Reliability may be your most important concern. Another is cost. As a leader, you’ll have to find a balance between quality issues and expense.

· This week, discuss how you are going to evaluate the recommendations rather than just saying you will evaluate them. What will you take into consideration? Will 802.11 be sufficient for your small business? What about a larger one? Do you need ATM? Why or why not? What about gigabit Ethernet? Fully develop your ideas so your instructor will know that you have understood the learning objectives for this week.

BB’s post states the following:Top of Form

In the network technology field, especially as a manager, decision making, and ownership of decisions and policies put in place are your main concerns.  You will have a team of highly qualified network technology, solution architects, and IT specialists that may be more “qualified, or have more technical knowledge” than the manager to decide the best course of action.  A manager, thus, must have a working knowledge of how the various network technologies work.  Reliability and cost, are important concerns as a manager making decisions, and as that leader, they will need to find a balance between quality issues to address and expense (cost/benefit analysis). 

This week, I will pretend I am a network manager who will evaluate a recommendation and what I will take into consideration.  For instance, will 802.11 be sufficient for the small business I am managing the network for?  Or what about the in the case of a larger company?  Does our company need an ATM, why or why not?  Do we need gigabit Ethernet? These are the questions I will have to make and give an evaluation as to why I chose that to present to the CEO or company board. 

A wireless communication is a flexible data communication system as an extension to a wired communication system (wired cables, etc.) (Jacob, 2015).  More and more businesses, small, medium and large, are utilizing wireless communication rather than wired due to the flexibility and efficiency it offers without all of the extra hardware infrastructure needed for wired communication set-ups; however, a lot of small businesses with one location, still utilized and highly trust wired network technology.  The IEEE 802.11 standard ,as mentioned in the scholarly article “Network Performance Analysis Within a Local Area Network” by Kuteyi Jacob from Delta State University (Oct. 2015), operates far from theoretical input/output limit depending on the network configuration.    IEEE 802.11 is a multiple access protocol in which stations in the network have to ”compete” for access to the shared communications medium to transmit data, thus, if two or more stations in the network transmit at the same time, a collision occurs.  Thus, if the network technology is not layered correctly, a large company may not want to utilize 802.11, however it may be sufficient for a small business with a few end users.  As a manager, I would evaluate this by reporting on how many collisions occur and what the downtime, or interruption times look like by recording the logs of session times.  They may not affect the users’ abilities at all, in which case, 802.11 would be sufficient.

The type of routing technique used in the network is very important to consider as a manager for the network performance. As a manager, I would want to have studies done to evaluate the performance of network technologies to make sure I am choosing the most adequate technology or technologies for my small or large company as seen fit.  Asynchronous Transfer Mode, abbreviated as “ATM” is one of these routing techniques.  In fact, in the same scholarly article referenced above, a comparison of the performance of Gigabit Ethernet and ATM network technologies using modeling and simulation was done as real-time voice and video conferencing type traffic were used to compare the network technologies in terms of speed, response times, and packet end-to-end delays.  What was found, was that while ATM is a 53-byte frame connection-technology, Gigabit Ethernet is a 512-byte frame (minimum) connectionless technology.  The performance analysis/evaluation indicated that the performance of ATM network is still effective, but does not keep up with the Gigabit Ethernets small delay time (Jacob, 2015).   Thus, as a manager, I could back up my decision by the evaluation that Gigabit Ethernet provides better performance than ATM as a backbone network, even in networks that require the transmission od delay sensitive traffic such as video and voice (Jacob, 2015). 

In any case, as a manager, when evaluating all of these factors, the benefits must always out way the cost.  This is done through a quantitative risk analysis and also a qualitative risk analysis (non-measurable factors). 

Jacob, K.A. (October, 2015). “Network Performance Analysis Within a Local Area Network.”  Department of Mathematics and Computer Science:  Delta State University.