Suicide Rates and Income
Mathew Hymes
Dr. Brandquist
CIS210
June 16, 2014

By its very nature, the information technology field and all things related to the internet are in a constant state of improvement. Due to the high need to be able to compete in any online market successfully a company needs to be able to keep a secure, working website with an uptime as close to 100% as possible. With the very real possibility of malicious crackers trying to do damage or steal data security is of the utmost importance. One of the best ways to improve security and control is for the company to host their own website internally. The benefit’s for doing this transition will be well worth the effort but there are few points that need to be considered before making the final decision. The goal of this report is to provide information and a guide to the process of creating a secure e-commerce site with minimum downtime.
Considerations:
There are a few factors that need to be considered before making the move to migrate the website. * Cost-Hardware, labor, software, etc. * Security-physical and physical * Physical space- structure, square footage, additional offices etc.
Solution
Using the System Development Life cycle we can define an efficient way to meet our set requirements and improve the existing website. Improving on the old foundation we can minimize costs, reduce project time and save the labor costs of having to start from scratch. This way we can focus on only redesigning parts we can’t recycle and improve on what we need to.

Goals of the SDLC: * Deliver quality systems that meet or exceed customer expectations when promised and within cost estimates. * Provide a framework for developing quality systems using an identifiable, measurable, and repeatable process. * Establish a project management structure to ensure that each system development project is effectively managed throughout its life cycle. * Identify and assign the roles and responsibilities of all involved parties, including functional and technical managers, throughout the system development life cycle. * Ensure that system development requirements are well defined and subsequently satisfied. One of the traditional and heavily used models in system development is Waterfall Model. (MTU.edu)
Waterfall Model
Through the use of the waterfall model is designed to flow in a linear, sequential order. This means that each phase of development must be completed before the next phase can begin. This creates a structured, easy to recognize “milestone” that can be tracked by all parties involved as the program progresses through each phase. Due to the need of predefined requirements and design there is no wasted time when the project is underway. As a contributor to TechRepublic explains, “Feedback loops exist between each phase, so that as new information is uncovered or problems are discovered, it is possible to "go back" a phase and make appropriate modification. Progress "flows" from one stage to the next, much like the waterfall that gives the model its name.

Waterfall Model

Although there are various different variations on the names of each phase they are all essentially close:
Requirements analysis: * Define specific requirements * Planning of time frame, costs, and resources (Risk assessment) * Creation of Use Cases * Finish with formal requirements specifications
Design:
* Define necessary hardware/software architecture * Define security parameters * Decide on programing language and data storage types/constraints * Define Resource management and user interface
Implementation/Testing:
* Building the product as per the requirements. * Coding/Debugging/Source Control * Alpha/Beta Testing
Launch/Deployment
* Once tested and cleared for use, “Go Live” * Tag with revision/version numbers
Maintenance
* Small changes to alter attributes or implement upgrades/improvements * Hotfixes/patching

Discuss what it will take to build Web architecture, move an existing Website with minimal downtime, and provide a disaster recovery solution to ensure the site is always available.
We know that we are planning to either develop a new e-commerce site or update the existing site to fulfill out set requirement. Another goal we should set is to have zero downtime, in terms of the site being available to the public, or as close to zero as possible. We’ll look into ways we can accomplish that goal. Listed below are some of the core pieces of hardware and some software components to consider in the architecture design.
Components for designing the Architecture for Availability
The architecture can use some or all of these components in a multi-tiered design. The more components used, theoretically the more secure the system is. * Routers/switches * Firewalls * Load balancers * Storage hardware * Web servers/front ends * File servers * Application servers * Database servers * WAP’s with encryption
The software system build on this architecture includes following: * Operating system software (Recommended: Linux for cost or Windows Server for support and options) * Database software and applications (MySQL) * Web/application server software (WebSphere) * Storage management software (backup/recovery, clustering and failover, etc.) * Ecommerce software (This is just a preference, too many to list and most of the differences are aesthetic.
The goal of all these components is to work together to create security through redundancy. When we utilize all the mentioned components within the system we are creating redundancies of information which will help secure data should a catastrophic lost. Some of the components also improve performances by balancing the data loads and preventing resources being drained or accessed by people that are not authorized.

Architecture

Our goal when building a new system is to makes sure that our system is secure, up to date and has the ability to expand or improve as new technology comes out. One way we trying to facilitate these requirements is through the uses of tiers. We have multiple options for an operating system, but my recommendation would be Linux or Windows Server. The major difference is price, Linux is open source vs while Microsoft can be expensive. The old saying that you get what you pay for applies here. Linux support is often done through forums, while Microsoft has an entire suite of support options. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume the decision was made to use Linux. The best option is use MySQL for designing the websites PHP. Due to the high demand for free open source options, there are thousands of free templates that can be used to simplify the designing process, which can save time and money. The ideal system will be as easy as possible to maintain, stay stable 24/7 and should be designed to never be offline. Obviously things happen, but the architecture needs to be able to put back online quickly to prevent loss of sales. To put it as a set of requires would look something like this: * Failures should be addressed immediately and thoroughly * Recovery of data should be done as soon as there are no additional threats to the data * The user interfaces and physical architecture has to allow for most IT employees to do quickly * Good policies should be developed for system maintenance * Online help should be accessible or at the very least the o * System should be able to check itself to verify it’s running at maximum efficiency Luckily with more advanced technology coming out we are offered more “smart” hardware and software that is designed to run self-checks, do some automated cleaning and stay running as efficiently as possible for as long as possible.
Data Protection
There should always be a focus on protecting the security and integrity of data. There will always be those who profit from stolen data. The loss of data can be detrimental to a company if they can’t prove they did all they could to prevent it from happening. Physical and digital protection is necessary, but there are other things to consider as well
Disaster management It’s impossible to predict the future and make a system invulnerable. Hard drives fail, electric components get fried, accidents happen, but there are ways to reduce a small incident destroying all the data you have stored. This is especially important if there was a larger incident like a natural disaster.
• Off-site backups:
Having backups stored at a different physical location can greatly speed up recovery time is the case discussed above.
• Off-site replication:
Similar to backups except the copies are of all files current as of the last replication. Backup systems usually don’t copy everything in order to save hard drive space and money, but replication is a clone of your database at the moment of its last scheduled copy
Protecting Applications
Saving the data is the ultimate goal, but if we can’t access that data then our website will be down as well. This means losing money. We avoid this by protecting the applications we use to manage the data. Through the use of clustering software, we can create addition redundancies to protect our applications.
Analyzing alternatives for self-hosting the site * Shared hosting * A dedicated server is available for the client application * Co-location * Cloud hosting

GANTT CHART

Explain and justify the system architecture you have selected.
It is important to build in redundancy where possible. Redundant equipment can provide both protection from failure and scalable processing for load peaks. For example, storage is shared between database servers; combined with a clustering/failover solution, this enables one server to take over requests for another in case of failure. Likewise, if an application server fails, the load balancers can direct requests to other servers.
Customer Ordering Use-Case
Discuss the support operations that the internally hosted Website will require after implementation.
Following are the various support operations: * Creating and managing the user accounts * System maintenance * Checking whether the devices are operating properly * Fast recovering of the components * Thoroughly monitoring the performance of the system * Creating file systems as per the requirements * Installing the software * Creating backup plans * Creating recovery policies * Monitoring the network traffic * Updating the system regularly * Implementing security policies for accessing the system resources
Explain how you will evaluate the performance of the new site and the success of your project.
The performance of the site can be evaluated using the below mentioned factors: * Customer Traffic logs * Sales online * Time, if any, of downtime * Data transfer numbers * Connection speed * Number of concurrent transactions * Transaction speed

References

System Development Lifecycle. (2010, November 4). System Development Lifecycle. Retrieved June 14, 2014, from http://www.security.mtu.edu/policies-procedures/SystemDevelopmentLifecycle.pdf