Week 6 Questions

1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and relate to each other?

Information architecture and infrastructure are similar in the sense that they are both enterprise architectures which include the plans for how an organisation will build, deploy, use and share its data, processes and IT assets, and speed development of new systems. The right information and infrastrusture information can make it cheaper, strategic and more responsive. Where the two differ is that information architecture identifies where and how important information such as customer records, is maintained and secured. It has three primary areas including backup and recovery, disaster recovery and information security. Infrastructure architectures includes hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisations goals. It has five primary characteristics including flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability and performance.
2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.

An organisation can implement solid information architecture by implement the 3 primary areas of information architecture. These include back up and recovery, disaster recovery and information security.

Backup and Security; Businesses can loose time and money because of system crashes and failures. One way this can be minimised is to have a back up and recovery strategy. A backup is an exact copy of the system and recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure and includes restoring the information back up. An organisation should choose a back up and recovery strategy that aligns with its business goals. this may be weekly, daily or even hourly.

Disaster Recovery; Disasters such as power outages, flood and harmful hacking, plague businesses everyday and organisations must develop a disaster recovery plan to prepare for these occurrences. A disaster recovery plan is a detailed process for recovering information or an IT system in the event of a catastrophic disaster. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan considers the location of the back up information and also for sees the possibility that not only the computer equipment but the building where employees work may be destroyed. A hot site is a separate and fully equipped facility where a company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business. A cold site is a separate facility that does not have computer equipment but is a place employees can move to after a disaster.

Information Security; Regulatory requirements to safe guard data have increased and concerns about identity theft are at an all time high. Managing user access to information is critical allowing for authentication and authorisation. It is important to have up to date antivirus software and patches.

3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

Flexibility; Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes.

Scalability; Estimating organisational growth is a challenging task. Growth can occur in a number of different forms. Scalability refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands. Anticipating expected and unexpected growth is the key to building scalable systems that can support that growth.

Reliability; Ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Unreliable information puts the organisation at risk when making decisions based on the information.

Availability; Addresses when systems can be accessed by users. With the emergence of the web, companies expect systems to operate around the clock. Systems, however need to come down for maintaince, upgrades and fixes. One challenge organisations face is determining when to schedule system downtime if the system is expected to operate continually. Many organisations overcome this problem by having redundant systems allowing organisations to take one system down by switching over to a redundant or duplicated system.

Performance; Measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction. To ensure adequate system performance and capacity planning helps an organisation to determine future IT infrastructure requirement for new equipment and additional network capacity. It is cheaper for an organisation to design and implement an IT infrastructure that envisions performance capacity growth than to update all equipment after the system is already operational.

4. Describe the business value in deploying a service orientated architecture.

Service orientated architecture (SOA) is a business driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. SOA helps today's businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It helps business increase the flexibility of their processes, strengthen their underlying IT architecture, and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among disparate applications and information sources.

5. What is an event?

Events detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. Pioneered by telecommunication and financial services companies, this involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter and automatically alert the people equipped to handle the issue.

6. What is a service?

Services are more like software products than they are coding projects. The must appeal to a broad audience, and they need to be reusable if they are going to have an impact on productivity. Early forms of services were defined at too low level in the architecture to interest the business, such as simple 'print' and 'save' services. These services describe a valuable business process.

7. What emerging technologies can companies use to increase in performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively.

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. Grid computing enables the vitalisation of distributed computing and data resources such as processing, network bandwidth and storage capacity to create a single system image, granting users and applications seamless access to vast IT capabilities. Virtualising these resources yields a scalable, flexible pool of processing and data storage that the enterprise can use to improve efficiency. With grid computing, organisations can optimise computing and data resources, pool them for large capacity workloads, share them across networks and enable collaboration. Grid computing goes far beyond sheer computing power. Today's operating environments must be resilient, flexible and integrated as never before. Organisations around the world are experiencing substantial benefits by implementing grids in critical business processes to achieve both business and technology benefits.