1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?
Information architecture identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured. The three primary areas/components of it are;
- back-up and recovery
- disaster recovery
- information security
Information infrastructure includes the physical pieces of hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation’s goals. The system needs to be adaptable to changes as the organisation faces change.
These information systems differ as the information architecture refers to the overall plan of how a business goes about configuring its resources whereas the information infrastructure refers to the actual implementation of the plan through the use of physical pieces of hardware and people’s skills.
They relate to each other as the architecture establishes the plan for the infrastructure implementation. This is supported through the following diagram.
https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/8/87/Infrastructure_Architecture_frontend.png
2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.
An organisation can implement a solid information architecture by implementing the three components areas of information architecture which are;
* back-up and recovery (provides exact copies of system’s information and the recovery component allows the system to run after a crash or failure and includes restoring the information backup).
* disaster recovery (businesses can establish disaster recovery plans to prepare for the occurrence of natural disasters. This usually involves having back-up information stored in another location).
* information security (manages user access and runs up-to-date anti-virus software and patches).
3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.
The following are the five primary characteristics of a solid infrastructure architecture:
1. flexibility: systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes and demands (this may involve multinational changes).
2. scalability: how well a system can adapt to increased demands of growth requirements. Many factors create organisational growth including; market, industry and economy factors. It also involves capacity planning.
3. reliability: (accuracy) ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Low accuracy puts the company at risk.
4. availability: when systems can be accessed by users. ‘High availability’ is preferable as its continually operational for a lengthy period of time. It measures relative to 100% operational or ‘never failing.’ Businesses should aim for the 5/9s (99.999 % availability). This ensures business continuity.
5. performance: measures how quickly a system performs a certain process/task or transaction. (E.g. in terms of efficiency IT metrics of both speed and throughput-the amount of items or materials passing through a a system or process). There is a growing pressure on systems to be faster.
4. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture.
SOA: An approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. SOA helps businesses be innovative by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. Helps businesses increase their flexibility of processes, strengthen their IT architecture and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among different applications and information sources.
An SOA is a style/concept/representation. A way of thinking. It’s not a framework that can be purchased. It allows enterprises to plugin new services or upgrade existing services, respond more quickly and is cost effective to changing market conditions. Its about using different sources to meet different criteria.
5. What is an event?
An electronic message indicating that something has happened, it detects threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information. E.g a new employee has entered the system.
6. What is a service?
Contains a set of related commands that can be reused, it is more like a software product than a coding project. Needs to be reusable if they are going to have an impact of productivity.
7. What emerging technologies can companies use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?
Virtualisation: a framework that divides the resources of a computer into sectors that allow a user to utilise the functions available. It’s effective as it provides a way of increasing physical resources to maximise the investment in hardware. Its benefits include:
-Rapid application deployment.
-Dynamic load balancing.
-Streamlined disaster recovery.
-Reduces hardware infrastructure and increases utilisation of software.
-Consolidates (and often reduces) power and cooling requirements.
This is supported through the following website: http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/what-is-virtualization.html which states that:
“Today’s x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application, leaving most machines vastly underutilised. Virtualisation lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that one physical computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. While others are leaping aboard the virtualisation bandwagon now, VMware is the market leader in virtualisation.”
Grid Computing: is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage, and network resources, coordinated to deliver improved performance, higher quality of service, better utilisation, and easier access to data. Used by scientific, e-Commerce, technical or engineering projects that require many processing cycles to complete a job. People can offer their free-processing time on home computers to companies. Grid computing provides the opportunity to researchers in an area to use the idle computers across the Internet for better use and better cause which is beneficial to human kind and technology.
It benefits include:
-Improving productivity and collaboration of virtual organisations and respective computing and data resources.
-Allowing widely dispersed departments and businesses to create virtual organisations.
-Building robust and infinitely flexible and resilient operational architectures
-Providing instantaneous access to massive computing and data resources.
-Leveraging existing capital investments, which in turn help to ensure optimal utilisation and costs of computing capabilities.
This is supported through the following diagram found at: http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/grid/images/gridcomp.gif
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