Sample Products

This page includes samples of products produced for various clients. They illustrate the critical thinking, breadth of technical expertise, and clarity of communication that characterize all Guidestar Associates products. Click the title to download the product.

Bring Your Own Device Mobile Security

Energized by the capability of consumer mobile devices, employees demanded them in the workplace. Information technology organizations had neither the time nor the budget to satisfy employee demands. Enterprises align employee demands with technology organization limitations by establishing a bring-your-own-device policy and infrastructure enabling employee productivity and securing enterprise data and systems. Security controls the enterprise places on employee devices must respect employee privacy and must not impact personal activity or user experience. Enterprises with successful BYOD programs achieve higher employee productivity, higher employee retention, and lower technology costs.

Cloud Computing Acceleration Point

Cloud computing has likely reached the market adoption acceleration point, signaling a period of dramatic growth of this transformational operating model for enterprise information infrastructure. Cloud computing will expand from its base of software services to infrastructure services hosting core business operations and data. The confluence of experience and success with software cloud services, extreme budgetary pressures, dramatic new infrastructure service offerings, and enhanced security and disaster recovery concern is convincing large companies and government agencies to increase the role cloud services play in their business model.

Continuity of Operations Planning

Continuity of operations refers to the ability of an enterprise to continue normal operations following an adverse event. The scope of adverse events ranges from minor incidents, such as failure of a piece of hardware, to disasters involving significant property loss. This document focuses on operations that leverage information systems. It addresses the systems, the individuals who use or operate the systems, and the facilities in which the systems and individuals function. It provides overall guidance on concepts for effective continuity of operations.

Energy Efficiency and Availability Management in Consolidated Data Centers

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) was driven by the recognition that growth in the number of Federal data centers was an inefficient use of Federal resources. Consolidation offers the prospect of expanding information technology benefits while reducing their costs to align with declining budget forecasts. FDCCI goals will be fully realized only if adequate planning and execution results in high-availability energy-efficient data centers. This paper discusses concepts and tools for planning and managing high-availability energy-efficient consolidated data centers.

System Availability

Achieving business goals requires information systems to meet mission based availability requirements. Availability requirements are generally met by incorporating redundant components in the design to maintain system availability even when individual components fail. This paper describes the calculations required to determine system availability based on the redundancy incorporated in the system design.

Enterprise Architecture - Blueprint for Transformation

Government thought leaders are looking across all enterprise business areas and information systems as they chart a bold course for enterprise transformation — from the enterprise’s current state, through a series of intermediate phases, to a new target state. A critical path milestone is to define a target-state enterprise architecture, the blueprint for transformation. This paper provides an overview of the core elements of an enterprise architecture essential to launch a successful transformation program.

Predicting Scheduling Success

An analytical formulation is derived to predict the success of scheduling activities on discrete multiple resource timelines using sequential approaches. Success is defined in terms of the probability of scheduling a single activity and the number and cumulative duration of scheduled activities. The results are extended to include scheduling activities with flexible start times. The principal assumption is that the activity start times are randomly distributed over the available time in the timeline.

AFSCN Demand Models for Scheduling Tests

The Air Force Satellite Control Network scheduling system needs to be tested with increased demand over the current 450 events/day to verify that it meets specified system performance requirements and that it is capable of supporting potential future demand. Scheduling system testing requires a fictitious mission test set that reflects the current distribution of satellites in various orbit classes and constellations. Demand from this mission set should reflect current patterns. This paper describes two demand models with 600 and 1200 events/day respectively. This paper contains no classified or sensitive data.

Analytical Representation of Trajectory Effects

Mission planning and analysis activities generally involve detailed precise modeling of spacecraft motion to define mission trajectories. Part of this activity is to determine the impact of off-nominal or highly mission specific behavior. This frequently involves parametric studies which exceed in effort the study of the nominal scenario. To reduce this effort, focus the analyst’s work on the most important issues, and aid in a deeper understanding of the dominant phenomena, it is useful to provide an approximate analytical model of the spacecraft behavior. This paper discusses a general analytical approach to mission analysis based on a perturbation theory of spacecraft motion.