1. what is the optimal IT Infrastructure required to get an edge over competitors?

Answer: It is very true that in today’s competitive market place there are new market entrants, low
cost products options and multiple suppliers are present. Selection of optimal IT Infrastructure
plays an important role for not only sustaining but also giving growth to the organization.

Infrastructure management can be defined as the management of an organisation’s basic operations

including its policies, equipment, data, human resources and processes, in order to achieve overall
business performance.

 Categories of IT Infrastructure management:-

 System management,
 Network management
 Storage management

 Benefits of IT infrastructure management:

 Efficient utilisation of the resources
 Helps in improving customer experience and satisfaction.
 Helps to deliver differentiated services
 Helps in improving the quality of the products
 It improves the innovation capabilities
 Provides tools and techniques to check the performance of employees
 Helps in exercising better control over the employees
 Helps in easily and accurately identifying fault in any of the processes
 Helps in saving a lot of precious employee time and organisational resources and
funds
 Provides configuration management tool that helps in designing the best layout
of the production processes
 Helps in increasing the production efficiency
 Reduces the cost of production
 Effective utilisation of the money
 Helps the organisation to gain an optimal point
 Better risk management
 Also, this kind of management helps the firms to get their hands on the critical
data in real time, combat the risks with greater efficiency and ease and prepare
for the future risks as well

 Sustaining growth of the organization

In technology-driven world, IT infrastructure management plays a very important role

in sustainable growth of the organisation:
 The designing and executing of short-term and long- term development plans
 Ensures that the infrastructure of the company is able to meet its current and
future needs
 Helps in project development and execution
 Helps in undertaking priority tasks such as maintenance, design, security,
development of the infra- structure system
  Helps in conducting research and recommends
 Helps in implementing any change necessary in the organisation for better
functioning
 Better utilization of data.
 Helps in creating backup strategy in case of any disaster
 Helps in standardisation of the hardware and the software to be used in the
company
 Helps to implement high security service for network, server and infrastructure
 Helps in short term and long term forecasting of the cost of the organisation

 Internet of Things (IoT) - Healthcare facilities are taking advantage of connected

devices to improve patient services. Some connected medical devices used are
 MRI and CT scanners
 wearable medical devices and remote patient monitors,
 video security cameras
 Electronic ID-enabled security doors

 Mobility and cloud access - Wireless access to data and information maintained in the
cloud on a mobile device is a game changer in healthcare, increasing availability of data
for patients, clinicians and administration alike. For example:
 80% of doctors use smartphones and medical apps
 72% doctors use them to access drug info
 65% of all interactions with health care facilities occur via mobile devices
 Care givers and patients can access test results 24/7 
 82% of healthcare professions feel that Wi-Fi availability is business critical

a. What are the various IT Infrastructure tools Organic Valley used for the rapid
business growth and how those tools helped in achieving the objective?

Answer: Various IT Infrastructure tools used by Organic Valley for rapid business growth are as
follows:-

Infor's ERP Adage as its core enterprise resource planning solution

o Global solution with comprehensive and rich ERP capabilities

o Modern user experience with role-based homepages, social collaboration, and
workflow
o Industry-specific functionality to cover unique business needs
o Deployment in the cloud or on-premises
o Helps to respond to customers’ needs, reduce wastage and plan to produce
efficiently.
o Helps to increase the power of large customer or retail bases;
o Easy to integrate with other tools.
o It is flexible and process based
o Highly scalable to improve profits by controlling the variables.
 o Helps to increase revenue and profits by streamlining the shipping process
o Helps to ensure that manufacturers ship the right products on time with the
longest shelf life.
o It optimizes order rates through profit-based allocations of orders according to
customer requirements
o Helps in lot tracking, multiple units of measure, attributes, and configurable
workflow-based processes,
o Helps to remove duplicate entries, extra maintenance, and lead time
o Helps in improving quality.

Infor SCM Advanced Planner (AP)

Infor Advanced Planning helps improve performance and profitability by
optimizing the manufacturing and distribution of all our dairy, meat and produce
products nationwide. Helps in solving tough challenges across the entire supply
chain. Advanced Planning easily adapts to the evolving requirements.

o Forecast future demand.

o Creating a consensus forecast
o Creating a preliminary delivery plan
o Creating a preliminary production plan
o Adjusting delivery and production plan
o Settle delivery and production plan

Infor Advanced Planning has benefited Organic Valley in following ways:  

o Boost manufacturing productivity
o Reduce raw materials costs
o Minimize excess finished goods inventory
o Reduce procurement costs.
o Reduce supply chain costs
o Reduce wastage costs

b. What are the various networking and security issues that may arise due to the
implementation of IT Infrastructure in the organization? Whether such types of
organizations will be benefited if are connected with server farms?
Answer:

Various networking and security issues that may arise due to the implementation of
IT Infrastructure in the organization are:-

 Reliability of service
o Organizations store huge amount of mission critical data and information on
cloud and require 24/7 accessibility.
 o If the cloud service goes down then business will not be able to access mission
critical data which can result in a huge financial and business loss for
organizations.
o Therefore a considerable amount of investment and planning is required from the
cloud service provider on their technology infrastructure to implement effective
measures including but not limited to redundant servers on multiple geographical
locations to provide service reliability.
o For-example in February 2008, cloud storage infrastructure of Amazon's Web
Service (Amazons-S3) experienced a downtime of several hours that caused
access issues and loss of data.

 Data Encryption
o Data on cloud and virtual machines are accessed through VPN.
o Since data available on a network, it can be attacked by hackers for various
frauds.
o Hence, sensitive data needs to be encrypted so that even if attacker manages to
gain unauthorized access, encrypted data will not be misused.

 Network Dependency
o IT infrastructure relies on internet connectivity. There is always need of good
internet connectivity for accessing data remotely through VPN on premise or on
cloud.
o If network is not available, then it will severely impact client systems and critical
business operations that needs to run 24/7 such as hospitals and financial
institutions.

 Unauthorized Access
o Since data available on a network, it can be attacked by hackers for various
frauds.
o Potential threats due to lack of control on un-authorized device gets access to the
secured network,
o Huge risk of data breach and data security for sensitive information in the form
of stored emails and documents

Whether such types of organizations will be benefited if are connected with server
farms

Yes, Organic Valley will definitely be benefited if connected with server farms. Following
are the reasons:

o Consistent and reliable tools to manage many servers at once (or one by one)
o Several monitoring capabilities
o Automatic, possibly encrypted backups
o Working MTA configuration
 o Central logging configuration (all logs are stored and processed in one place,
enhancing security)
o More secure configurations of several system components

A server farm is designed to provide a massive and redundant source of computing

power for computing-intensive applications. Server farms generally consist of
thousands of servers, but their size can vary in different organizations and based on
underlying requirements. Each server within the server farm is networked to the
others and to a central management server. The central server manages the overall
operations of these servers such as assigning processes, resource balancing,
scheduling, security, updates and more. Although server farms are primarily used
for enterprise and scientific applications, they can also be used to provide various
services, such as core computing services for the primary application (ERP/CRM),
data and application backup services, load balancing and more.