Assuming that you have convinced the Board to implement the fully online program. Now you need an Education management system (EMS) to manage all the processes efficiently. Initially, the university has been using simple tools such as spreadsheets to manage the data. However, the online program is designed to cater to a larger base of students, which could be at least 5 times the student base of offline programs. It may lead to the generation of a large amount of data. The alumni base is also going to increase over time. It is crucial to maintain the connection with alumni. Hence, a platform catering to the needs of alumni should also be included in EMIS, Education Management Information System. The amount of data to be processed and stored is going to increase in future. Also, the existing data of alumni need to be made available through EMIS. As the student base is going to increase, the number of queries of new potential students is going to be humongous. It would not be feasible for administrative staff to handle all the queries manually. Hence, a chatbot to cater to the basic queries of potential students can also be incorporated. However, the Board has assigned you a limited sum of money for this project and the project needs to start from the next academic year. Now that it has been finalised that an EMIS implementation is to happen, you, as the Chief Technical Officer of the university have to answer the following questions:

• Should you make the EMIS software from scratch or buy it as a COTS?
• Should you host the EMIS data on in-house servers or over the cloud?

Remember while answering that your IT team is already occupied with ensuring the smooth working on existing courses running in hybrid mode.

Question 2 (Single question)

10marks Prepare a table of various software, hardware and other infrastructure explain your choice for these options:

• Make, rent or buy?
• Inhouse hosting or cloud?