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Trend Works Management (TWM) is a US-based organization, serving three sites including San Diego, CA, New York, NY and Denver, CO. The company is offering management consultant services. The home office is located in San Diego, CA, containing HR team members and marketing and sales team. The company is experiencing growth and plan to expand the market in two new locations within every two years. With the expansion, the database of the company is also growing. Increasing database can only be managed with exceeding the need for hard disk growth. Within the current setting, the server capacity will be overloaded with the flow of such a large database. It is also causing other issues such as long delays and poor performance. The management of the past 15 years historical information-based database is another issue of concern. The paper includes the analysis of effects of the increasing database on the design and potential concerns of the company for upgrading the system from SQL server to Server 2012. The recommendation will be provided to improve the current password policies at the object and database level. Two ways will be recommended to address the high availability issue. A replication topology will be designed to copy the data between the headquarters and branch office database.
TWM is experiencing the annual growth of 4% in its existing operations. Furthermore, the company is planning to expand its operations in two new markets in every two years with the expected database expansion rate of 5% and need for more hard-disk space. The growth and expansion will make the existing database capacity overloaded which will cause long delays and poor performance of existing database system. Hence, the existing database will not support the company’s design and the business growth will limit the utilization of the existing design of the system effectively. In this situation, the company’s design needs to be reviewed and upgraded in order to manage the increasing capacity of a database of the business. If the design will not be reviewed, the increasing database cannot be managed appropriately. It will cause various system issues. The growth of the database within the existing system design may lead to the events of auto-growth that may cause the various amount of data to go out of space. Because an increasing number of database file will lead to more auto-growth events. More auto-growth events mean demand for additional space to manage the expanding the database files (Larsen, 2011). When the disk space will not be enough for existing data. The database files will be fragmented on the disks. The increasing number of physical fragmentations with a large number of auto-growth events will lead to more time to read the database and will demand more organized design to manage the growing business database requirements (Ben-Gan, 2012).
TWM is currently pertaining to the SQL server 2008. But the increasing database management requirement cannot be fulfilled with the existing 2008 server. It needs to be upgraded to manage the growing database requirements. However, upgrading the server from SQL 2008 to SQL Server 2012 has some potential technology concerns in it. When the technology gets upgraded, it creates some uses which should be closely handled by professionals to ensure the successful upgrading. One of a potential concern of upgrading SQL 2008 to 2012 requires more servers based on synchronous replication technology-related concerns. Some obstacles need to be overcome while upgrading the path. For example, there are some unforeseeable risks that should be analyzed and in order to minimize future complexity, system errors, high costs and inefficiencies (Singh, 2015). Some foreseeable risks to TWM include the privacy concerns related to the login accounts and risks associated with storage of historical data. The issues should be catered pre handed otherwise it will create potential concerns for the company.
Currently, TWN is using only SQ server logins which is an authentication policy where the account resides to master database on the domain. The master database sustains the information regarding username and password. If the access needs to expand to more than 1 SQL server, the account needs to be created in each server instance. Similarly, if one needs to change the account password, the password should be changed in each server instance. The domain security policies can be overridden in term of password expiration and complexity but it will call for less secure accounts.
The alternative authentication policy is Active Directory (AD) login service which is recommended to TWN. Window authentication through Active Directory-based account for the Domain. In this authentication service, the active accounts can be checked through AD. AD will tell whether the password is active and working or not. The AD authentication also checks the level of permission given to the single SGL server in its account use. In this case, the password and account requirements are explained once which ensures strong authentication and security policy. AD authentication also includes the feature of group access to the SQL server instance. If someone from the group leaves the company, the AD group ID can be removed to restrict the access of that user to the server.
The consultant can adhere to the current password policy at the object and database level through ensuring the following steps:
First of all, the consultant should ensure that its domain functional level should be at least Window 2008. Secondly, the policies should be created by creating the domain admin account. The policies can be created under SQL server logins or through Active Directory Login. Next step is to attach the users or group to it. In the end, the policies get verified and confirm the configuration. Consultants are the end users of the firm. The adherence to password policies can be managed through a systematic process. for example, the database manages the user authentication. The password security policy is developed by the security administrators to ensure the security of data access (Smith, & Wong, 2016). The consultants are the data users who should change the passwords time to time and within different courses when they have doubt that their password is revealed. In this way, unauthorized access to the database can be reduced. Passwords are automatically encrypted during network connections through Advanced Encryption Standards at the object level.
High availability issues in TWN contains the issue of the increased load of the system which may cause increased downtime and failure at some single point. The high availability issue can be minimized by ensuring that service is available all the time and the system will be able to respond to the user’s request within the appropriate time. It will ensure the high level of system quality and operational performance. The two main issues in the case are redundant web servers and high traffic on a server may also cause issue potential disruptions. However, the main cause of failure is the inefficiency of the load balancing layer to support the server and traffic load. So Single point of failure is a load balancing layer inefficiency which is causing high availability issue. The recommendations to TWN to overcome the high availability issue are as followed:
First of all, it is recommended to use top to a bottom approach where the top management and professionals should monitor the load balancing layer in order to immediately locate the failure beneath this top layer. For example, monitoring will help to identify the bottom layer (web server) issues, so that load balancer can stop that specific server redirecting request (Maier, 1983).
Another recommendation is to apply the distributed approach which can connect multiple redundant nodes as a cluster so that each node can be capable of detection of failure and its recovery.
Active Directory-based replication topology is used to copy the data between the headquarter database and branch office. A single domain controller is responsible for the automatic handling of this function. Two functions are performed by the domain controller. The first function is to act as bridgehead server and the second function is Knowledge Consistency Checker (KCC) to determine the connection objects and replication topology that can be used to perform communication between different sites through bright head servers. The replication topology can be refreshed between sites to determine the topology within the same site or between sites (Lindley, 2002).
The replication topology to copy data may face certain issues of latency. First of all, the company may have to face the replication latency in Active Directory due to denying of defaults. To minimize this issue, all links of the site must bridge by default and add branch office and headquarter site links to it to reduce replication latency.
The Figure one is showing company replication before change and the Figure 2 is representing company replication plan after changes (Lindley, 2002).
| Figure 1. Before: Leaving the default Site Link settings results in a plethora of connection objects and lots of replication traffic. |
| Figure 2. After: The same domain after making changes to the Site Bridging properties. |
TWN is currently using SQL server 2008 to maintain the database of consultants. Each office maintains their relevant information and all three sites has one server that is merged in San Diego’s main database server. Company has to manage its website link with the database to carry forward timely information to the customers about its consulting service. Company has the opportunities to overcome the issues of expanding database by adopting the Microsoft SQL 2012, two additional servers, use of Active Directory login, high availability system and effective archive plan for outdated historical information.
Lindley, A, (2002). Get active directory replication right. Retrieved from https://redmondmag.com/Articles/2002/10/01/Get-Active-Directory-Replication-Right.aspx.
Larsen, G. (2011). SQL Server database growth and auto growth settings. Retrieved from https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/sql/database-administration/sql-server-database-growth-and-autogrowth-settings/.
Maier, D. (1983). The theory of relational databases (Vol. 11). Rockville: Computer science press.
Singh, V. (2015). Upgrading to SQL Server 2012/2014 – How to overcome the top 5 ‘gotchas. Rtrieved from http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Upgrad
Smith, L. C., & Wong, M. A. (Eds.). (2016). Reference and Information Services: An Introduction: An Introduction. ABC-CLIO.
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