Scavenger Hunt 4 Flashcards
What factors typically drive personal purchases of IT?
If it feels good, do it!
Flavor of the day - momentary influences
Lowest purchase price
Sale items
New products
Hot Rod syndrome
By contrast, what factors typically drive corporate purchases of IT?
Business requirements
- Match the tool to the job you need to get done
Many systems
Control costs (TCO)
- Maximize revenue, minimize expenses
- More to the cost of owning a computer than just the purchase price
How do standardized purchasing agreements reduce IT acquisition costs?
Hardware and software purchases
Volume discounts
- Standardization drives volume and therefore lowers the purchase prices
- Saves money in the long run through the lifetime of the system through support, maintenance, & training
Define the term BYOD
“Bring Your Own Device”
Company doesn’t provide employee with a device, the employee chooses what they’ll use
Varies from company to company, and type of employee within a company
What are the characteristics of a BYOD program?
Company supplies an allowance to employees who are responsible for buying proper IT equipment for themselves
What are the benefits of BYOD?
Benefits:
- Shared cost
- Employee satisfaction
- More engaged
- Less likely to leave for another employer
- Likely to have happier employees who are more productive
- They know the tool they chose very well
- Consumerization
- Might save money
What is the “Consumerization of IT”? What factors led to it? How does this impact corporate IT?
Consumer device (iPhones, iPads, etc.) have been proven to be incredibly popular and wanted for corporate business
Tend to be faster, smaller, lighter, and tend to be easier to use than corporate standard equipment
Bring Your Own Everything
What is TCO?
Total Cost of Ownership
What are Direct Costs and Indirect Costs?
Direct Costs:
- Shows up on the organization’s budget and can be easily defined as IT costs
- Ex: Initial purchase price of a computer
Indirect Costs:
- Not visible at IT costs in a company’s budget
- Ex: One of your employees can’t do work for two hours because his computer’s broken, so the cost of his salary during that time is an indirect cost of owning the computer
What are the characteristics of the two different PC management styles – Unmanaged vs. Managed?
Unmanaged:
- Users DIY
- Installing applications and managing PC settings
- Could care less about control of costs
- Buy whatever
Managed:
- Tools, processes, and policies are used to consistently and automatically manage PCs
- Can’t install software or change critical settings
- Choose what you want and how to run it
Which single item is the most expensive?
Software
Which single item can bring the biggest savings if it is locked and well-managed?
IT support cost (software)
“The $1000 PC is a _________.”
Myth!
What is an “image”? What is a “gold image”? How are images used? How do they impact TCO?
Image: OS + Applications + Settings
Gold Image: Represents how all other should be set up
- Build once
- Test and tweak
- Deploy repeatedly and automatically thousands of times
Impact:
- Labor savings for IT
- Increase productivity because they get it correctly and quickly
Methods for application deployment and their implications for TCO
Manual Workflow
- Install everything manually, individually
- “Sneakernet”
Automated Workflow
- System automatically downloads when computers are connected to network
- Push or pull your own applications (like your own App Store)
- Automatic and quick
Implications:
- Increases productivity and reduces TCO
- Better license management
- Reduced labor cost
- Avoiding legal problems
- Reduced waiting for software installations
- Reducing indirect cost component of TCO
What is Patch Management? Why is it necessary? Who should do it?
Bugs happen!
Must patch OS & applications
Can’t rely on users
Automated Systems:
- Labor savings and reporting
User Account Types
What are they and how are they different?
Administrator
- Full control over the system
- Can install software, programs, and hardware drivers
- Can create and modify users
- Create passwords
Standard User
- Permitted to log on to the computer
- Run programs already installed
- Customize their own settings
- Save files
- Prevented from making system-wide changes
What best practice does Mr. Olson recommend?
Give “standard” accounts to users
How does standard accounts impact TCO?
Prevents users from messing up your settings and machines
However, it can increase indirect costs
System settings – contrast user settings vs. computer settings
User Settings:
- Follow the user no matter which specific computer they’re using
Computer Settings:
- Affects how the computer operates no matter who is using it
Security Settings:
- Things like how long your password has to be, or what apps can be running at a certain time
Operational Settings:
- Automatically set up various network storage locations
- Automatically configures the printer and drivers
What is Microsoft Group Policy? What is its role in managing systems at work?
Example of an operational setting
Infrastructure that allows you to implement specific configurations for user’s computers
What is the purpose of PC instrumentation? How does IT learn about PC problems?
Detects and reports problems before it causes problems for the users
SMART
Leading management systems…
What is Microsoft’s solution?
Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
What “world-class” system was mentioned for managing Macs?
JAMF
Briefly, what are the three motivations for properly managing computers at work?
TCO: saving money on each machine by managing them well
Compliance: we must carefully manage machines and have records that prove we were compliant with laws
Security: you can’t secure something unless you’re managing it
Daas
Desktops as a Service
Virtualizing a user desktop system so instead of having the power on the computer, everything happens on the server
VDI
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
“On Premises”
You do it yourself on premises but Daas is in the cloud
- We pay for someone else to do it for us
Thick Clients
Client is a traditional PC that you’re using to access VDI environment
- Does all the work
- Powerful CPU
- Lots of RAM
- Lots of data storage
- Software
Complex
- High TCO
BYOD
Thin Clients
All work is done on the server
Only input/output occurs at client
Simple, cheap hardware
Many form factors: desktop, notebook, tablet