Monday, September 27, 2010

Enterprise Architectures (Week 6)

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


Information Architecture
A general plan of how IT is to be used within an organisation. A firm decides what goods and services they will produce. 


Information Infrastructure
The implementation that will provide for effective IT systems, including hardware, software and services.


How do they differ?
IT architecture is the general plan and IT infrastructure is the implementation of the plan


How do they relate?
They are both vital parts of the implementation and change of IT systems within an organisation.

Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture 


Information architecture identifies how important information, such as customer records, is secured and maintained. A solid information architecture includes 3 primary areas:

  • Backup and recovery - businesses continually lose time and money due to system failures, therefore, one way to minimise the damage of a system crash is to implement a backup and recovery strategy
  • Disaster recovery plan - is a detailed process for recovering information. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan considers the location of the backup information
  • Information security - Identity theft and information security is on the rise, therefore managing user access to information is a critical piece of the information architecture. Ensuring up-to-date antivirus software is another way to minimise the risk of information security

List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 


Reliabilityensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Low accuracy puts the organisation at risk.


Scalability - is a systems ability to meet growth requirements and refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands. Scalability involves capacity planning.


Flexibility - requires being able to meet changing business demands, systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes.


Availability - high availability refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for long periods of time. Availability ensures business continuity. 


Performance - measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction. There is a growing pressure on systems to be faster.

Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 


A service oriented architecture (SOA) is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repetitive tasks or services.


SOA ensures IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. Users are able to re-use applications multiple times for different tasks using existing applications, which makes development cheaper and more flexible. 

What is an event? 

An event is an electronic message indicating that something has happened, it detects threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information. An event is repetitive, it is business procedures that happen often such as a credit check.

What is a service?

A service contains a set of related commands that can be re-used, it is more like a software product. An example of a service is a system that has a trigger that will send an email to all people in the system. 

What emerging technologies can companies use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?


VIRTUAL COMPUTING is an emerging technology that can be used to increase performance and utilise infrastructure more effectively. Virtual Computing runs multiple operating systems on a single computer and ensures enterprise applications perform with the highest availability and performance. It also reduces capital costs by increasing energy efficiency.

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