IT Concepts

A tax accounting firm has been using Microsoft Access as a database to track their customers and their details for over 20 years. Realising that it is time for an upgrade, they’ve asked you to make a series of recommendations relating to security, operating systems and choice of database. Importantly, they are not asking you to develop any software or create the database – only to make some recommendations so that they know how to proceed.

They will need you to:

Recommend a database. Your two main choices are MySQL or PostgreSQL, but you can make a different recommendation if you prefer. As they are currently using Access, the client has already determined that it no longer meets their needs, so it is not an option. You will need to explain why you have made this choice and compare that choice to one other database. Important: we have not covered databases in this course, so we don’t expect you to have a lot of detail on your decision, but you will need to do some research into which is a better option for a small business.
Recommend and justify an operating system for their new server. This will be dependent on OS features and its compatibility to the database you have recommended. Generally the choice here will be between Windows and Linux, but other operating systems – such as the Mac OSX – are an option if you want to take that path.
Make some recommendations as to how best to handle and security and manage their backups.
Recommend a process by which they can manage the transfer of data from their existing system to the new system once installed.
In addition, for testing purposes they will need to get this to run on a virtual machine, so you will need to provide some (basic) instructions as to how to set up and configure the VM to handle the new software.

Word limit is 1500 words. Harvard referencing is required.