Week 6 Questions

Enterprise Architectures

1. What is information architecture? What is infrastructure architecture? How do they differ? How do they relate to each other?

Information Architecture identifies where and how improtant information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured. There are three primary areas of information architecture: 

1. back up and recovery
2. disaster recovery
3. information security.

Infrustracture Architecture includes the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combines, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation's goals.

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture

A single backup or restore failure can cost an organisation more than time and money - some data cannot be re-created, and the business intellegence lost from the data can be tremendous. Chief information officers (CIO's) should have enough confidence in their back up and recovery systems to be able to walk around and randomly pull out cables to prove their system is sage. The CIO shouls also be secure enough to perform this test during the peak business hours.

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

There are five primary characteristics of a solid infrastructure architecture:  

1. Flexibility - systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes, for example a system might be designed to include the ability to handle multiple currencies and languages, even though the company is not currently performing in other countries.
2. Scalability - refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands. If an organisation grows faster than predicted, it might experience all types of performance degradations, ranging from running out of disk space to a slowdown in transaction speeds.
3. Reliability - ensures all systems are fuctioning correctly and providing accurate information. Reliability is another term for accuracy when discussing the corectness of systems within IT.
4. Availability - addresses when systems can be accessed by users. High availability refers to a system of component that is continuously operational for a desirably long period of time.
5. Performance - measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction. Not having enough performance capacity can have a devastating, negative impact on a business.

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

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a busienss-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services.



Service Oriented Architecture

 Benefits
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 businesses increase the flexibility of their processes, strengthen their underlying IT architecture and reuse their existing IT investments by creating conncections among information sources. SOA, with its loosely coupled nature, allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion. This enables businesses to address the new business requirements, provides the option to make the legacy applications as services, thereby safeguarding existing IT infrastructure investments.

5. What is an event?

Events are the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology - they detect threats and opportunites 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 best equipped to handle the issue.

6. What is a service?

Services are  more like software products than they are coding projects. They must appeal to a broad audience and they need to ne reusable if they are going to have a impact on productivity. New services can describe a valuable business process.

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

Companies can use the following emerging technologies to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively:

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. (See question 4)
• Virtualisation - is a framework for dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. It is a way of increasing physical resources to maximise the investment in hardware. 
• Grid Computing - 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