Blog 5, Week 6

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

Information Architecture - Identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

Infrastructure Architecure - Includes the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment.


Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture
Backup and Recovery: Daily or hourly backups to storage servers.
Disaster Recovery: Plan for disasters so when they do occur the organisation is prepared. For example hot site or cold site.
Information Security: Managing users access, up to date antivirus software and patches.

List and Describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

• 1. Flexibility - Ability to handle multiple currencies and languages
• 2. Scalability - Refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands
• 3. Reliability - ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information
• 4. Availablity - addresses when systems can be accessed by users
• 5. Performance - measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction

Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture

Service Orientated Architecture is a business driven IT architectural approac that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services.

It helps businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs.

What is an event?

An event detects threats as well as opportunities while alerting those who can act on information.

What is a service? 

• Need to be reusable so it increases productivity
• Must find the right level of granularity
• Must appeal to a broad audience
• Loose Coupling - capability of services to be joined on demands to create composite services or disassembled just as easily into their functional components.
• Interoperability - capability of two or more computer systems to share data and resources.



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

Virtualisation - framework for dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments.

It allows people, processes and technology to work together more efficiently

Grid Computing - is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage and network resources.