23-Ind-B4 Design of Information Systems · December 2013
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams — December 2013 — 98-Ind-B4, Design of Information Systems. 3 hours; closed book, no calculator permitted. The exam comprises four parts: Part A (select 20 of 40 terms and explain each in a sentence or two, 2 marks each = 40 marks), Parts B and C (select 2 of 5 questions in each part, 11 marks each = 22 marks per part), and Part D (select 1 of 2 questions, 16 marks). Complete answers to every term and every question in all four parts follow below, not only the minimum selection a candidate would submit on exam day.
Reference texts: Laudon & Laudon, Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 15th ed.; Schwalbe, Information Technology Project Management, 9th ed.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
Cloud computing is defined less by any single technology than by five characteristics an offering must have to qualify as "cloud." On-demand self-service lets a customer provision compute or storage capacity without a human interaction with the provider. Broad network access means the service is reachable over standard internet protocols from any capable device. Resource pooling (multi-tenancy) lets the provider serve many customers from a shared physical infrastructure, with the customer generally unaware of and indifferent to the exact physical location of their resources. Rapid elasticity allows capacity to be scaled up or down, often automatically, to match demand almost in real time. Measured service means usage is metered and billed like a utility — pay for what is consumed — rather than paid for as owned capital equipment.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides virtualized compute, storage, and networking — the customer installs and manages their own operating system, middleware, and applications on top of it (e.g., Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine). Platform as a Service (PaaS) adds a managed runtime, development tools, and middleware, so a developer can build and deploy applications without managing the underlying servers, storage, or OS patching (e.g., Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure App Service). Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers a complete, ready-to-use application over the web, with the provider managing every layer beneath it — the customer only configures and uses it (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft 365). Moving from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS trades customer control for reduced management burden.
A public cloud is operated by a third-party provider and shares physical infrastructure across many unrelated customers (multi-tenant); it offers the lowest cost and fastest provisioning but the least direct control over where data physically resides. A private cloud is dedicated to a single organization, whether hosted on-premises or by a third party on isolated infrastructure, giving more control and easier compliance at higher cost and with less of cloud computing's economy-of-scale benefit. A hybrid cloud combines both, with workloads and data able to move between them — e.g., keeping sensitive customer data in a private cloud while bursting compute-intensive but non-sensitive workloads to a public cloud during peak demand — giving an organization the cost/scale benefit of public cloud where it is safe to use it and the control of a private cloud where it is not.
