Abstract
Well-Known Institute of Management is situated in New Delhi, India, and offers a 2-year fully residential post-graduate program in Management (MBA) and a doctoral-level program. While the permanent and fully residential campus of the institute with state-of-the-art facilities is under construction (expected to be completed by June 2024), the institute is currently functioning from a rented transit campus. With the increase in intake in July 2020 and subsequently in 2021, the total number of students in the campus is going to increase from 240 to 400. Two buildings are hired on rent which is 1 km away from the transit campus. The IT team of the institute is asked to conduct a survey, analyze, and propose a solution to provide networking and Internet facilities for 150 students who are going to reside in the newly hired hostel buildings. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the networking requirement has changed. Dr Vivek Gupta, Assistant Professor in the area of IT and systems at Well-Known Institute of Management, is heading the IT team of the institute. Puzzled between various options of buying network infrastructure on premise or buying it as a service (infrastructure as a service), Dr Gupta needs to do a thorough analysis before recommending a feasible and plausible solution.
Keywords
Driving through the traffic on a hazy winter day of January 2021, Professor and Dr Vivek Gupta of Well-Known Institute of Management (WKIM), Delhi, India, was pondering on the best way to provide Internet and networking access to the students and faculty. As of now, he is having two options. One is to buy networking infrastructure and have it installed on the premises and the second is to buy infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Both the options have their pros and cons. Over the past few months, he had several rounds of discussions on the subject with the various stakeholders. However, the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic had necessitated a fresh perspective in the face of the evolving situation. He, therefore, concluded that another round of discussion and a detailed analysis is required to determine which course of action to follow before presenting the proposal to the management.
About the institute
WKIM was established in the year 2016 in New Delhi, India, with a vision to offer quality management education. Currently, the institute is offering a 2-year fully residential post-graduate program in Management (MBA) and a doctoral-level program. While the permanent and fully residential campus with state-of-the-art facilities is under construction (expected to be completed by June 2023), the institute currently is functioning from a rented transit campus equipped with all basic facilities like an academic building, library, computer lab, hostels, mess, sports facility, and gymnasium. Till the last academic year, the institute had an intake capacity of 120 students only. Since MBA is a 2-year fully residential program, at least 240 students were always present on the campus. In January 2020, the governing body approved to increase student intake to 180. Consequently, the number of students from July 2020 and subsequently in 2021 would amount to 360 and add to that a few doctoral students; the total number of on-campus students would be around 400.
The hostel buildings in the transit campus have 250 single occupancy rooms which were not sufficient to meet the requirement. Consequently, the institute had decided to rent space and in February 2020 managed to get two more buildings in the vicinity of the transit campus. These buildings are on the opposite sides of the main road, approximately 1 km away from the transit campus. Both buildings have single occupancy rooms. One building (Building A) has 3 floors with 20 rooms on each floor and the other (Building B) has 5 floors with 30 rooms on each floor. The combined capacity of these two buildings is 150 hostel rooms.
Current IT infrastructure
The transit campus has an excellent Wi-Fi facility accessible throughout the campus. All official terminals (approximately 100 terminals which include office desk of faculty and staff, computer lab terminals, classroom terminals, video conference room, and library terminals) are connected through a wireless LAN offering a top Internet speed of 1 Gbps. Furthermore, more than 50 dual-band 802.11n access points across the campus provide seamless connectivity on the institute network. The network is based on high availability architecture with core distribution and access layer switches. This campus-wide Wi-Fi network is used by the faculty and students to access e-learning resources on their smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, or tablets. Two service providers were engaged to provide Internet services, namely, Shaan Enterprises (100 Mbps) and BSL Enterprises (50 Mbps). The Internet traffic of both service providers is filtered through a firewall exclusively purchased by the institute and monitored by its IT team. A representative architecture of the IT infrastructure of the transit campus is provided in Exhibit 1. Over the last few years, almost all the networking devices had been sourced from Isco Enterprises, one of the best designers and manufacturers of networking equipment in the country.
IT infrastructure of transit campus.
Networking infrastructure for upcoming hostels
Dr Gupta joined WKIM in the year 2018 as Assistant Professor in the area of Information Technology and System Management. He is also heading the IT team of the institute and working tirelessly to streamline the IT infrastructure and related processes. The renting of two new hostel buildings warranted an increase in IT infrastructure and services. The IT team had to conduct a survey of the new buildings and suggest equipment required to create network facility and Internet connectivity. Since the transit campus was already using networking equipment manufactured by Isco Enterprises, the IT team naturally recommended purchasing additional equipment from the same service provider. After a careful survey and analysis, the IT team proposed a list of additional devices required (Exhibit 2) and further that all new devices should come with a 5-year warranty and support to save on periodic maintenance contracts. This time period was recommended based on the life of IT equipment which is assumed to be 5 years as per the IT policy of the institute. The total cost of these devices (including cabling and other passive work) was estimated to be Rs 3,790,000 (Exhibit 2).
List of networking equipment for new hostels.
Includes 5 years warranty and support + installation + cabling work.
The scrap value will be computed assuming that the life of these devices is 10 years.
As the institute has plans to shift to its permanent campus after June 2024, the management was a bit apprehensive about incurring this huge expenditure. Furthermore, it wanted to understand the need for the recommended high-configuration networking devices (supporting 1 Gbps) when the current requirement could be fulfilled with the configuration at par with the existing devices (supporting 100 Mbps). The management compared the cost of networking equipment purchased in the year 2018 for the transit campus hostels (Exhibit 3) and opined that the cost of the proposed networking equipment is very high. Dr Gupta provided a comparison with the help of technical specifications of proposed devices and the devices already installed in the transit campus (Exhibit 4). He also explained why the networking equipment currently installed in the transit campus could no longer be purchased with the required warranty and support (5 years) given that they are close to their end of life, as announced by Isco Enterprises (Exhibit 5). Furthermore, the proposed equipment comes under plug and play category and suited for the upcoming permanent campus also. Only the passive work like cabling will be scrapped. However, the management was still reluctant to approve the investment. In March 2020, the management asked Dr Gupta and his team to explore other possibilities for connecting the two hostel buildings with the institute’s network.
Networking equipment purchased during 2018.
Includes 3 years warranty and support.
Technical comparison of networking equipment (proposed vs previous installation).
End-of-life announcement of networking equipment installed in the transit campus.
Dr Gupta and his team explored the possibility of providing dongles to each student in the new hostels. A dongle is a portable modem that can easily be connected to the computer/laptop to provide an Internet connection using 4G or 3G mobile broadband services. A break-up of the purchasing and operating cost of dongle devices was also prepared (Exhibit 6). While the dongle seemed a cost-effective alternative, the IT team had their own concerns, listed in Exhibit 7.
Cost break-up of using dongle for network facility.
Life of 2 years only.
Cost increases on an average of 10% annually.
Concern of IT team in providing network facility through dongle or IaaS of Shaan Enterprises.
By the end of March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic had gripped the country forcing the government to announce a nation-wide lockdown. Since the academic calendar was close to its completion, all hostels had to be vacated immediately and students were asked to go to their homes. During the period between April and June 2020, the institute premises were closed and all key officials had to work from home. The next academic year started online in the month of July 2020 and the students continued to take online classes from their homes. The role of the IT team became all the more critical—the team had to ensure that all classes are conducted smoothly. However, time flew and by December 2020, there were indications from the government that the institutes could open and allow students back to the campus while maintaining strict norms such as social distancing, wearing masks, regular sanitization. The IT team was instructed to make arrangements keeping in mind that even though students are returning to the campus, they would still prefer to take their classes online from the comfort of their respective rooms. This meant additional pressure on the bandwidth consumption. The institute had already purchased an online platform WBx from Isco Enterprises in the month of June 2020 for conducting online classes and exams. WBx platform is a web-based application running on the WBx cloud used to conduct online classes and organize meetings, webinars, guest lectures, placement interviews, etc. The current 150 Mbps bandwidth would not be able to support WBx’s bandwidth requirement (Exhibit 8) if all the students attended classes through the software. To enable 400 students to attend online classes using the institute network, 300 Mbps Internet bandwidth (excluding 50 Mbps that was already taken from BSL Enterprises) is a must. The IT team asked BSL Enterprises to provide the cost of additional bandwidth (Exhibit 9).
Prescribed bandwidth for using WBx.
Cost of additional bandwidth from BSL Enterprises.
Expected to increase 5% every year.
The actual bandwidth requirements and utilization will vary based on multiple factors, including web camera specifications, resolution, frames per second, number of users joining the meeting, number of cameras active in the meeting, number of active cameras on the same network, number of users actively utilizing the network, other online activity of the user, etc.
During a casual discussion over a New Year party with one of the executives of Shaan Enterprises, Dr Gupta came to know that Shaan Enterprises also offers IaaS. In this service-based model (Exhibit 10), Shaan Enterprises would deploy all necessary hardware and also provide Internet connectivity to the students residing in the new hostels. WKIM would incur no capital expenditure in this case. All necessary maintenance and support costs would also be part of the bundle. The offer also made sense given that the networking switches installed in the transit campus had got burnt because of the surge in the power supply, necessitating additional maintenance expenditure. Instances such as these were generally not covered in the annual maintenance contract purchased by the institute on a regular basis. If WKIM chooses IaaS, the infrastructure would be completely operated and maintained by Shaan Enterprises. However, there were some additional conditions (Exhibit 11) in hiring IaaS from Shaan Enterprises.
Proposal of Shaan Enterprises.
Dr Gupta was happy that his team now have two more options to suggest to the management. This being said, all three options had their own pros and cons. For example, if all the necessary hardware is purchased from Isco Enterprises and installed in the hostel buildings, the institute would still need to invest in additional Internet bandwidth. The Internet fiber of BSL Enterprises pass through the same main road on which the two new hostel buildings are located and so it could be used to create a ring network encompassing the transit campus, hostel building A, and hostel building B, without incurring the additional cost of laying cables. Furthermore, the Internet traffic could also be filtered using the institute’s existing firewall. The proposal by Shaan Enterprises is equally attractive because it did not involve any capital expenditure. Internet services are complementary with 10 Mbps per user. However, the Internet traffic would be controlled by the firewall of Shaan Enterprises. Also, this proposal could become costly in the long run.
Priorities needed to be set before proposing a solution. In addition, the financial viability (short term as well as long term considering a 6% internal rate of return) of the alternative options also had to be appropriately assessed.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
