Chapter 5 – Enterprise Architecture

Q1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

-Information Architecture depicts where and how important information is maintained and secured within an organization. Three primary areas include: backup and recovery, disaster recovery and information security.

-Information Infrastructure supports the organizations goals through the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment. The five characteristics that make up a solid infrastructure includes: flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability and performance.

Q2. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

• Flexibility – businesses must be flexible to meet business changes when the company is growing and performing
• Scalability – how well a system can adapt to increasing demands. Factors include: market, industry and economic factors.
• Reliability – ensures all systems are providing accurate information and functioning correctly
• Availability – often depicts when a system can be accessed by its users
• Performance – is a depiction of how well a system performs a certain process or transaction in a particular amount of time

Q3. Describe the business value in deploying service oriented architecture

Service orientated architecture (SOA) is a business driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. It enables businesses to increase flexibility of their processes by allowing the IT system to adapt quickly to the changes.

The key technical concepts of SOA include services, interoperability and loose coupling.

Q4. What is an event?

An event is an electronic message that indicated if something has occurred. By detecting threats and opportunities, events alert those individuals or organizations that can act on the information given and best handle the situation accordingly.

Q5. What is a service?

A service is more like a software product yet it describes a valuable business task. They provide much needed solutions for business problems, with ways of implementation automating aspects of technical services within the organization. They appeal to a broad audience and must be reusable to ensure an impact upon productivity occurs.

Q6. What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

-Virtualisation: is a framework for dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. It is a common way to increase physical resources to maximise hardware investments.

Through virtualisation differing processes, people and technology can work together to meet service levels through increased efficiency.

-Grid Computing: is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage and network resources which are coordinated to deliver higher performance and improved quality of service.

It allows for organizations to optimize computing and data resources, share across networks large capacity workloads. Must be resilient, flexible and integrated to meet modern demands of society.