D1 - Examine the impact of potential faults

Explain the impact of one fault from each of the areas below:


Servers

The mail server has failed to function due to a software error – If the mail server that is used for the entire organisation suddenly stops working, this means that every single employee in the office would be unable to send/receive emails. In many cases, this would mean that the amount of work that they are able to do is limited as they may be relying on email for specific things. Updating or patching the software that has caused this failure to occur could take a long time, which would have a huge effect on a company that are already operating on a tight schedule. This period of time could be extended if the issue isn’t fixed by simply applying an update to the software causing the fault. If the software needs to be reinstalled, this could take hours or even days to perform the install, costing the company even more time. If all else fails and the server needs to be replaced, this could affect the company on a monetary level as a replacement mail server will cost a lot of money that will heavily impact the company’s limited budget.

Internet

The internet connection has been accidentally dug up breaking the fibre cable – If the fibre cable that connects the building to the network has been damaged, then obviously the computers being used by employees will be unable to connect to the Internet. On top of this, the servers that provide email and host the company’s website will also be offline. The impact that all of this has is that people are unable to access emails or files that are stored on the server, delaying the time it takes for work to be completed. If their webserver is down, then it will affect customer’s attempting to access the newspaper website, this could affect the company negatively by damaging their reputation as potential clients will remember that they had problems with access to their website. Replacing the fibre-optic cabling will be very costly, thus impacting the budget that the organisation has.

Individual PC Issue

A NIC inside the receptionists PC has failed – If the Network Interface Controller for the receptionist’s computer has encountered a hardware problem and is no longer working, than the receptionist will be unable to connect their PC to the network. The impact that this will have is that they cannot read their emails, meaning that any important updates to the operation of the business will be missed, and they may have to manually make a record of any interactions that take place at the office. As well as time and efficiency being affected, the NIC card will have to be replaced with a model of the same specification so that it is compatible with the same PC. This will obviously affect the budget of the company (even if it is minimal) as they will have to pay for the hardware replacement.

P1 - Explain the impact of policies on the Troubleshooting process

Security:

In any organisation, having a number of security policies in place is extremely vital. The newspaper office has a number of security policies in place, for example, all documentation that is supplied with any new hardware or software is kept in the IT manager’s office, no software is to be installed on company machines unless proof of license is available and the administrator has disabled certain privileges for users, for example, internet access is restricted to permitted sites only at all times and users cannot download files from the internet unless they have been given permission from the administrator.

This can have various impacts for an IT support technician, for example, if the ability to modify computer settings has been disabled for security reasons, it may prevent them from being effectively able to fix a problem, or it will take much longer for the repair to take place. The benefits to having this policy in place are that it will prevent any malicious/unauthorised software from being installed on the company’s computer systems, as well as any of the settings accidentally being changed by inexperienced users.     

Costs:

Like all businesses, the newspaper has a budget assigned to each department. The IT department is likely given a budget of around £50,000-75,000 a year. This money can be used to purchase all of the equipment that is used by the department (PCs, web servers, software, repair tools etc.) It is important for the IT department to make sure that they have the best possible equipment available to them as this will directly affect how long it takes to resolve any hardware/software problems, and how good a job the technicians are able to do. When purchasing equipment, the IT department will need to make sure that anything that is brought meets their specifications and is safe for them to use. For example, certain tests will need to be performed on any hardware that the company purchases to prove that they function as intended and that there are no faults. These tests should ideally be annual.

The impact that this can have on the troubleshooting and repair process is that the organisation may find that they do not have enough of the budget left to purchase better equipment/tools should they find that their current equipment is not efficient enough when fixing any issues.   

Systems Downtime:

Systems downtime can be caused by many different things such as hardware errors or even simple maintenance taking place, however, it can also be prevented if members of the IT staff have been following the correct procedures and policies. System downtime can be harmful to a company, as it can result in them suffering a huge loss. For example, if the servers were to fail, this could potentially lead to members of staff losing all of their data if none of it were backed up.

If the IT technicians needed the systems to be down in order to perform maintenance, they would always require approval from senior management before they can go ahead with the maintenance. This means that everyone at the company would be aware that the computer systems at the company would be going down for a certain period of time.

Disruption:

Disruptions are to be expected in any kind of work environment, therefore, procedures need to be in place in order to fix any problem caused by disruptions and to try and minimise the impact that these disruptions can have on the organisation. If a disruption occurs that affects the servers at the office, then procedures, such as backing up all data so that nothing is corrupted or lost.

If the IT department do not have these procedures in place and disruptions occur, then it can have a very negative impact on all of the support technicians. They would be the people responsible for failing to prepare for problems to occur. 

Resource Allocation:

In the newspaper office, various resources (such as printers, photocopiers, email servers etc.) need to be correctly issued to the departments that require them. If any resources are wasted this can waste valuable time and money. These resources also need to be maintained over a certain period of time, however, if too much money is spent on a single resource this will directly affect how much money can be invested into other resources.

Prioritisation:

Everything at the newspaper office needs to be prioritised so that all of the tasks that need to be completed are done so in the correct order and as efficiently as possible. Therefore, the problem that is the most serious, or is causing the most disruption at the office, is the first one that needs to be fixed, then the second most important problem after that and so on. For example, if one of the servers that holds all of the user accounts is down, that would be the most important problem for the technicians to fix as it is preventing all of the employees from accessing their accounts and all of their files.

The benefit that prioritisation has to the IT staff is that it allows them to know the order that jobs need to be done and that no time is wasted. The negative impact that prioritisation could have is that some of the less important jobs may be pushed further down the list, especially if more important ones keep appearing, meaning that they may end up not being completed.