Information architecture identifies where and how important information within an organisation is stored such as how customer records and secured and maintained. This includes the backup and recovery of information, disaster recovery plan and information security. Information infrastructure refers to the hardware, software and telecommunications equipments which provide the foundation to support the organisations goals. This infrastructure must be flexible, scalable, reliable, available and provide good performance. The difference between the two is that information architecture refers to the plan determining how the vital information is stored and maintained whereas information infrastructure is the concrete methods and hardware employed by an organisation to implement and store the information.
Describe how an organisation can implement solid information architecture
Any single system crash without adequate backup and recovery can cost an organisation more than the time and money lost in returning the system, much of the data cannot be recreated and thus an organisation must implement a successful backup and recovery plan. This a strategy for how the information it to be copied and stored in the event of system failure and the recovery refers to how the organisation will return the system to working order after failure. This needs to complement the business strategy because there is many different types of backup and recovery media which only differ in the time and money, these include CDs and DVDs, redundant storage servers and tapes or disks. Each organisation will have vastly different amounts of critical information and thus each organisation must implement a strategy which will address the needs of the business. One organisation who has implemented a solid backup and recovery plan is 7-eleven Taiwan who upload the backup and recovery information from the central location to other chain locations daily. They have implemented a new technology allowing quicker and more reliable backup and recovery of information which automatically resumes the download of information when the connection fails without having to start over which saves valuable time.
Another vital strategy which a company must implement in order to have solid information architecture is the disaster recovery plan which details how and organisation will recover information or IT system in the event of disaster such as fire, flood or harmful hacking. The organisation will need to determine whether they require a hot site which allows employees to restart work immediately at a fully equipped separate site or a cold site which is not equipped however still provides a working environment in the event of disaster. This plan must minimise the cost to the organisation in recovering from disaster as well the cost to the organisation as a result of loss of vital information and technology. One organisation Milspec Services Pty Ltd acquired a business continuity plan through a technology company known as GCOMM which addresses the need to recover the business activity in the event of disaster. The solution involved a virtual cluster of new and existing servers and storage hardware, and a data centre in a different location which contained replicated data. The information is updated via a WAN, which ensures a less than five minute recovery point and less than four hours to shift all input/output and processes to from the primary location to the secondary location in the event of disaster.
In terms of implementing solid information architecture the organisation must also address information security. The organisation must safeguard the vital data through managing user access such as passwords so that only those with the pass word can access the information and up to date antivirus software and patches to ensure that hackers spammers and other malcontents are not able to sabotage the information. One organisation which have updated their security plan to gain more solid information architecture is OMD a media buying and planning subsidiary of Omnicom Group Inc which adapted the installation of patches onto the servers. Initially the network administrator had to manually install patches on all the 100 serves throughout the organisation which took over a week, now OMD uses automated installation software for patches and upgrades so that all departments where not down all at once during a patch install.
List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.
- Flexibility-an organisation must be able to meet all the business changes including the requirements of the business at the present time as well as the business requirements in the future. One example might be the ability to hold various languages and currencies in the event that the company begins to perform business in other countries, it will have the flexibility to adapt to this demand otherwise it will need to redesign all its systems.
- Scalability-there is a number of factors which can create organisational growth such as market, industry and economy, scalability refers to the ability which an organisation can adapt to increased demands. If the organisation grows faster than anticipated it may experience performance degradation however an organisation may implement capacity planning to determine the future IT infrastructure requirements for new equipments an additional network capacity.
- Reliability-ensures that all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information, unreliable information places a risk on the organisation when making decisions based on information.
- Availability-addresses when the system can be accessed by users, an organisation requires a system which has high availability in that it is continuously operational for long periods of time. One challenge faced by an organisation is determining when to schedule downtime for a system to carry out maintenance if the system is expected to operate continuously.
- Performance-measures how quickly a system performs certain processes or transactions, inadequate performance capacity will have a significant effect on the business as customers require efficient services. Capacity planning can help determine future IT infrastructure requirements for new equipment and additional network capacity.
Describe the business value in deploying service oriented architecture
Service orientated architecture is a concept which involves integrating business as linked repeatable tasks to ensure that the IT systems can adapt with the rapidly changing business demands. SOA involves reusing the existing IT investments to provide flexibility and strengthens the already existing It infrastructure. Rather than starting fromt he beginning to build business processes the business uses existing applications to run current processes. With increased need for scalability and flexibility in business SOA allows an organisation to address the new requirements and to plug in new services or upgrade the existing services in a granular fashion. An example of a business that has successfully incorporated SOA is Ezy DVD. They represent the value in deploying SOA with the need to integrate the order processing when they started running business online, they hire DVDs through both the web and retail shops and with SOA a single application now handles the initial order processing both sales channels so that order processing is now efficient and effective.
What is an event?
An event detects any threats and opportunities in the organisation and alerts those who are equipped to act on this information. This uses IT systems to monitor a business process for events that are important. Such threats and opportunities include low stock in a warehouse or a large charge on a consumer’s credit card. A credit monitoring system automatically alerts a credit supervisor and shuts down an account when a $7000 charge is processes on a $6000 credit card.
What is a service?
Is simply a business task, what a company does on a regular basis, these business processes broken up into repeatable tasks or components. There is both high and low level services such as saving and printing documents or performing a credit check, customer information and process payment. A service is valuable because it describes a business process that is used not only by programmers who want the code in another application but also for business people who want to use it across multiple products such as car loans or mortgages. The company Telstra Australia builds its land, mobile and broadband services starting at the highest level services to the lowest level services to ensure that not services are built and go unused.
What emerging technologies can companies use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?
Virtualisation is one emerging technology companies can use, it is a framework for dividing resources of a computer into multiple environments. With system virtualisation the rescources of one single computer can be presented as a collection of separate computers, they appear to both the user and the outside world as separate computers with their own network identity, user authorisation and authentication capabilities, operating system version and configuration, applications and data. It is one technology particularly able to utilise infrastructure more effectively with the ability of running software on one physical unit that emulates multiple pieces of hardware. The logical functions of computing, network and storage are separated into their physical functions which can then be manually of automatically allocated to meet the changing needs of the business. With virtualisation one virtualised server costs four virtual servers and therefore the company are able to cut the costs of their infrastructure as well as offering rapid application deployment, dynamic load balancing and streamlined disaster recovery. With an exponential increase in the internet business are required to update their methods off business to reach a wider market and keep up with the current market who require efficient and effective services. There has also been adaption from manual work to automated services virtualisation offers a cut in the power and money required to run the required multitude of servers and the need to have personnel to manage the increase in servers and thus it is one of the emerging technologies to increase performance and utilise hardware efficiently. 
Grid computing operates by applying the resources of many computers to a single goal at one time. The computing, network and storage resources in separate places are aggregated to provide improved performance, higher quality of service, better utilisation and easier access to data. Organisations can optimise computing and data resources, pool them for large capacity workloads, share them across networks and allow collaboration. In terms of increased performance and better utilisation of hardware, it allows improved productivity and collaboration of virtual organisations, allowing widely dispersed departments and business to create virtual organisations to share data and resources, providing instantaneous access to massive computing and data resources. Grid computing works by leveraging existing capital investments, which in turn help to ensure optimal utilisation and costs of computing capabilities. Google the successful global search engine is based on one of the largest grid computing systems in the world. It runs on thousands of servers by estimate to be around 450 000 in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centres around the world. By having its data centres distributed geographically around the world it offers improved performance to its world wide audience. 
No comments:
Post a Comment